commuCity: a social network system for the non-resident elderly in big cities in China

Abstract

Urban non-resident elderly is an emerging population in the first and second-tier cities of China in recent years. They come to cities mostly for helping their children take care of newborn babies, but the feeling of loneliness in a strange city is a real problem for them. We undertook a qualitative study of the non-resident elderly in a metropolitan Chinese city to better understand their living conditions and how can information and communication technology potentially help them develop interpersonal relationships in a new city. Our observed needs and behavior patterns of those elderly were used to generate scenarios and based on which we proposed our design of commuCity, a system that incorporates social works of community to help better organize social activities for the newcomers of non-resident elderly.