Improving awareness and social connectedness through the social hue: Insights and perspectives

The ability to maintain a high cognitive function, autonomy and social support are key factors to promote "successful" ageing. The Social Hue is an envisioned peripheral awareness lighting system, which seeks to enhance social connectedness between the elderly and their caregivers. We adopted a participatory design approach to gain a shared understanding of the users' context, their perspectives on ambient lighting technologies and wearable sensing, privacy concerns and acceptance of a system to promote social interaction. We obtained detailed accounts of our elderly participants' social support structures and their interactions with their caregivers. Moreover, our exploratory results suggest important design requirements to realise the Social Hue system.