Co-Designing a Recommender System for the Elderly

To promote a healthy life-style and to increase well-being of elderly people, we have extended a digital picture frame - the CARE system - that interleaves a picture display mode with a recommender mode. In recommender mode, CARE encourages its users to engage in physical and mental training activities. The success of such a system essentially depends on the extent to which given recommendations are followed. The current paper investigates in how far rewarding schemes as known from computer games could be deployed in order to increase user appreciation of the CARE system. To this end, we prepared and ran a co-design workshop with a peer-group of senior citizens. Finally, we draw conclusions that will guide our work towards a gamified version of CARE.