Ageing With Grace

The population of world is ageing at a rate faster than the number of young people is growing. A gap that is most strikingly visible in Chinese society with the implementation of one child policy, China's ageing population has reached over 200 million according to recent estimates. This poses an imbalance between the older generation who are still clinging onto paper money and simple lifestyle practices and younger technologically sound generation.

We propose to design a smartphone application, dedicated to service of elderly population. We plan to lay out the app with big font and easy instructions, along with easy to choose from pictorial guide for different services they would like to enjoy.

Our aim is to reduce the impact of ageing, delay in care of elderly people, and provision of better communication and entertainment for senior age group thereby reducing depression and other mental illness affecting mass population.

According to United Nations Statistics, an estimated 962 million people are aged 60 and above in 2017.This number is growing on an unprecedented rate and elderly people make a big part of world's population. As the technology has taken over the world by storm in last decade, the elderly people feel more and more alienated in a planet running on apps and programs they are mostly unable to use. The current apps and websites available are either too complicated, or require an avid knowledge and skill set to operate fully, both of which elderly people are unable to comprehend, hence they feel lonely and dependent on their children or grandchildren to take care of matters for them.

The part of population we are focusing to serve are mainly senior citizens of the society who are left behind when their children grow up and they feel lonely and often are affected by various physical and mental illness. The world that they were used to is rapidly transforming into a technologically driven community, and senior citizens do not find themselves to be actively participating in this. To make them feel involved and be able to use technology that is easy to use and provides them with their specifically desired solutions.

The application we intend to design will solve the most pressing issues for seniors including easy access to hospital locations and contacts, locating nursing homes, finding restaurants and malls that are elderly people and disabled friendly, and being able to communicate with people of similar ages, who like to take part in similar activities.

The application will be user friendly, keeping in view the special needs of senior citizens, like they may not recognise many abbreviations or jargon and get confused by their use. The maps and location for the hospitals and nursing homes or rehabilitation centres will be clear and well explained with voice input that can be reheard if needed, as many elderly people have hearing loss in advancing age. The inclusion of options to join a support group, where they can talk their heart out or any other activity groups like yoga, meditation, dancing or simply playing board games will make people feel more socially alive and included.

Our designed solution will directly address the needs of the increased elderly population, a significant number of people unaware of technologies and helpless in some circumstances where they might not get noticed socially. We are solving their health, social and moral issues by an APP. According to survey we conducted, there is no comprehensive solution in the market. Another prospect is that should be a more healthy part of the society and able to contribute in the development of the region where they exists.

We are using data mining techniques and integrating with the socially available option for the welfare provision of the elderly people. In our approach, based on the collection of needs of the elderly people, we design a framework that predicts the demands of the elderly people region by region and connecting the guardians of the elderly people along with bringing all the stakeholders like banks, hospitals and transportation in a one APP.

The game changer in a socially accepted APP design is a more simple approach that leads the elderly people not to select and choose more options but address their needs by state of art machine learning methods to gather and predict the elderly people requirements. This design will lift the burden from the younger caretakers and increase their dependability over the system last longer.

We are a team of 4 people currently collecting bio statistics data , survey the needs of the elderly people, making integration plans and designing the APP. In future more people are going to join specially those who are the caretakers of the elderly people. This can bring a lot of people connected socially together for this project over a cause to support elderly people active and participated.

Our five main goals in next year is to collect more data of elderly people , design a more easier APP, formal and informal ventures with all the stakeholders, publicly inform the use of the APP and increase the number of people benefited from the APP.

In long run, propose the governments and the hospitals to link with this APP in creating bonds more strengthen. For this we can push the policy makers and researchers to improve our design and encourage our efforts for loud in the crowd manner.

1- families of elderly people are not cooperating too much

2- stakeholders are not giving us attention

3- the resources are not enough to populate the design into a solution

1- Generate more understanding about the benefits of this APP

2- Meet both political and social activist to bind with us for a forum that links to the stakeholders.

3- Find sufficient sponsors and resources that can elevate our model

four full time researchers working currently.