Assessing the Needs of Mobility Solution for Older Adults Through Living Lab Approach: An Experience Report

ABSTRACT

Staying mobile is the key to ensuring high quality of life for older adults. With the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to live and move around independently becomes more critical for the most aging society. While several efforts have been made to invest in mobility solutions to help improve older adults’ mobility, there is still a lack of good practice and guidelines for developing such a niche Information Technology (IT) solution. In this paper, we report our experience of using Living Lab, a design science approach, to assess and capture the needs of mobility solutions for older adults. A semi-structured interview involving 25 older adults was conducted. We identified interesting and practical requirements/functionalities from the participants that might be otherwise overlooked if we followed the traditional software development process. The participants provided valuable feedback to help improve our mobility solution in two main areas, mainly the design and functionality of the application. The findings from this case study can potentially be applied for future work that attempts to address similar problems in the same domain. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.