About CURE-Elderly-Personas
CURE-Elderly-Personas are designed to be applied in AAL (Ambient Assited Living) and related projects supporting researchers and practitioners by designing products and services for older users with diverse problems, concerns, needs and limitations. The set of senior Personas are based on a multidisciplinary longitudinal cross-national survey on persons aged 50 years and older including data at the micro level (SHARE). The developed CURE-Elderly-Personas are fictitious persons synthetically generated from average traits mixed across countries and represent archetypical senior persons older than 60 years, living at home, based on real data from eight European countries: Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands (northern European countries), Austria and Germany (central European countries) and Italy, Spain and Greece (southern European countries). Data from these countries have been chosen because of their similar cultural background.
What are Personas?
Personas are a design tool representing archetypical, fictitious users based on real user data in form of (narrative) user descriptions (Alan Cooper, 1999).
Reference:
Cooper, Alan. The Inmates are Running the Asylum. SAMS, 1999
What is SHARE?
SHARE is a multidisciplinary longitudinal cross-national survey on persons aged 50 years and older including data at the micro level (Börsch-Supan and Jürges 2005). This database includes detailed information on health, well-being, economic circumstances and social networks and builds the basis for the development of a set of archetypical, fictitious older persons – the CURE-Elderly-Personas.
Reference:
Börsch-Supan, A., & Jürges, J. (Eds.) (2005). The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe – Methodology. Mannheim: Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Ageing.
Who are the Users of CURE-Elderly-Personas?
Everybody working in the development of AAL products and services:
- Designers
- Developers
- Researchers
- Practitioners
Project Partners
CURE with its broad knowledge and experiences in user requirements analysis and evaluation as well as qualitative methods, such as Persona generation and experience in AAL technologies builds the basis to achieve the goal of the creation of a CURE-Elderly-Personas set and the included manual. The VID, experts in the field of statistics and demography, complements the consortium with their large experience and knowledge with large databases and data analysis methods.
CURE - Center for Usability Research and Engineering, is one of Europe’s leading organizations in the area of user experience (UX) research comprising the fields of usability engineering, human-computer interaction (HCI), user interface design (UID), user centered design (UCD) and Ambient Assistant Living (AAL) research. CURE comprises a highly interdisciplinary team assembling all skills of contributing disciplines such as computer science, psychology, sociology, pedagogy, didactics, industrial design, communication science and management science.
VID - The Vienna Institute of Demography strives for the combination of scientific excellence with proactive relevance in analyzing and projecting demographic trends and in evaluating the social and economic consequences of population ageing. Thus, VID combines innovative methodological work with empirical analysis and communication of scientifically based insights. It gives special attention to the demography of Austria and to European comparative analysis. The Institute is embedded in the structure of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).
Acknowledgements
The CURE-Elderly-Personas are fictitious persons synthetically generated from average traits mixed across countries. Photos are taken from an external database. CURE-Elderly-Personas materials and documents do not represent private data from a single person. Information included in CURE-Elderly-Personas materials and documents do not infringe any privacy and data security rights.
This project website and project documents presented uses data from SHARE. The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through the 5th framework programme (project QLK6-CT-2001-00360 in the thematic programme Quality of Life). Additional funding came from the US National Institute on Ageing (U01 AG09740-13S2, P01 AG005842, P01 AG08291, P30 AG 12815, Y1-AG-4553-01 and OGHA 04-064). Data collection for wave 1 was nationally funded in Austria (through the Austrian Science Foun-dation, FWF), Belgium (through the Belgian Science Policy Office), France, (through CNAM, CNAV, COR, Drees, Dares, Caisse des Deports et Consignations et le Commissariat General du Plan) and Switzerland (through BBW/OFES/ UFES). The SHARE data collection in Israel was funded by the US Na-tional Institute on Ageing (R21 AG 025169), by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (G.I.F.), and by the National Insurance Institute of Israel. Further support by the European Commission through the 6th framework program (projects SHARE-I3, RII-CT-2006-062193, and COMPARE, CIT5-CT-2005-028857) is gratefully acknowledged. CURE-Elderly-Personas materials and documents do not represent private data from a single person participated in the SHARE project.