Technologies for Supporting Social Participation with a focus on intergeneretional Interactions

Loneliness increases mortality risk by 50% and is one of the main causes of depression. Several factors like living far away from the family, not being able to move much due to physical problems, or being unable to use communication technologies favor the likeliness of feeling lonely, especially in later life. We propose Lifehsare, a system for intergenerational communications that facilitates connecting people, enabling them to participate in the life of each other either in an active (synchronous interactions) or passive (asynchronous interactions) way. Current proposals for intergenerational communication do not address the problems related to the lack of time to share and lack of topic to talk that young usually have when interacting with their older relatives. Our proposal addresses these problems by implementing a method that requires no effort to share on the side of the young and by automatically enhancing the shared information. Furthermore, our experience with the evaluation of our proposal was translated into design recommendations that extend the current literature on design guidelines for applications for older adults.