Professional Updates

Designing Technology to Keep Seniors Connected: a Response to the Public Health Crisis of Social Isolation

Date:

Thursday, 23 January 2020

Time:

10.00am – 12.00pm

Venue:

Smart Classroom 04-01, Level 4
Centre for Translational Medicine (MD6)
National University of Singapore
14 Medical Drive, S(117599)

Speaker:

Prof Ron Baecker
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Bell Chair in Human-Computer Interaction
University of Toronto

Chairperson:

Prof Gerald Koh Choon Huat
Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health

Synopsis:

Prof Baecker will review in-depth a case study of the design and commercialisation over a decade of an app to help connect seniors to family and friends in order to reduce social isolation, loneliness, and depression. The technology must be accessible to seniors even if they are intimidated by computers, and work despite any sensory, motor, or cognitive challenges they may face, and independent of their fluency in any particular language. He will refer to conventional guidelines for user interface design, describe how he and his team has applied them, and stress how these must be enlarged to apply to the design of a product, not just an interface.
REGISTER HERE

About the speaker:

Prof Ron Baecker is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Bell Chair in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto.

He co-founded the Dynamic Graphics Project, and founded the university’s Knowledge Media Design Institute and its Technologies for Aging Gracefully lab (TAGlab). Recently, he has been a research lead in AGE-WELL, Canada’s technology and aging network.

He has been named one of the 60 Pioneers of Computer Graphics by ACM SIGGRAPH, has been elected to the CHI (Computers and Human Interaction) Academy by ACM SIGCHI, has been named an ACM Fellow, and has been given the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award and a Canadian Digital Media Pioneer Award.

He is the author of 5 books including Computers and Society: Modern Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019) and is the founding Editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Assistive, Rehabilitative, and Health-preserving Technologies (Morgan & Claypool, Publisher).