Capturing seniors' requirements for assistive robots by the use of attention cards

Abstract

This paper describes and reflects upon a senior-oriented participatory design methodology that facilitates communication, attention and creativity. Previous research indicates that seniors tend to lose focus and start cross talking during workshops, which results in broad and superficial findings. However, our workshop methodology indicates that the use of attention cards helps the seniors to stay focused by visualizing concrete first person narrative scenarios. This paper does not describe the findings of the workshop. Instead, we use our experience to propose ways in which the process of eliciting user requirements for novel technologies from old users with no prior experience of the technology in question can be made.