Northwood is a care home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Northwood has two Smart floors, controlled by Novalte systems. These systems use voice-activated technology to allow residents the freedom of controlling lights, beds, televisions and more. Residents that use this technology have more freedom and independence as they were previously unable to control things around their rooms due to physical disabilities. The CEO of Novalte, Michael Cullen, explained that Novalte saves employees approximately 45 minutes a day by allowing residents to control things themselves using the software.
Our first job at Northwood was to design something that used technology to help residents in their day-to-day lives. Our second job was to create a media campaign that would empower residents in some way. We worked in small groups and produced a process book to document our work. We produced our images, prototypes and process book pages independently. These are my pages from our book.
During our first meeting, Northwood residents, Ruby and Violet spoke about their difficulties traveling throughout the building due to their lack of mobility. Many residents in Northwood struggle with mobility and are wheelchair-bound, making it difficult to push the buttons in the elevators. This means that residents often have to wait for a more mobile person comes to press the buttons for them.
This gave us the idea to create an app to control elevators in Northwood. Residents loved this idea. However, upon presenting our first design, Northwood staff determined that this type of app would not be viable, as the use of wifi or Bluetooth in our system could be hacked, jeopardizing the safety of residents. Unfortunately, this meant that pursuing this idea was no longer realistic.
