Within the European REACH project (Responsive Engagement of the Elderly promoting Activity and Customized Healthcare) we had the opportunity to look for ways of stimulating healthy eating among seniors.
To see whether something is improving (food intake) we should be able to measure it. For this contextual interviews and co-reflection sessions with seniors were held about their opinion on eating and their life in general. With a set of personas and an overview of existing and possible new ways of measuring it quickly showed accurately measuring foodintake is simply very hard and there is no such product that can currently properly do this.
Diagram indicating which solution could suit which persona
We shifted our focus towards stimulating food intake. We took the collected data from the interviews and created an affinity diagram to take cluster and make some solid conclusions regarding stimulation of food intake. Both through this data and existing literature we found socializing and whether or not someone cooks to be very relevant to someone's eating behaviour.
Affinity diagram
We were provided by other partners within the REACH project with an interactive table. During two weeks of "Google Ventures Design-sprints" we developed and tested 2 possible applications for this that could stimulate healthy eating behavior: a social table, stimulating sharing, socializing and eating together and a cooking table, stimulating healthy eating through enabling seniors to cook more often.
"de Kooktafel"
3 months
3 days a week
1 computer scientist, 1 cognitive psychologist, 1 Industrial Design Engineer