Design of a home-based food assistance service for the elderly

Abstract: The urgent needs of food assistance for senior citizens increase rapidly. Elderly people are physically weak, especially those who are living alone, longliving, disabled and semi-disabled, and it is difficult for them to prepare nutritious meals on their own. Besides, since most of them suffer from chronic diseases and have special dietary requirements, the food provided to the general public is not suitable for them. It is becoming increasingly important to provide healthy eating assistance services for the elderly people at home. In this paper, users’ needs were inspected from the perspective of service design and an elderly-friendly meal service system was built for them. Firstly, we analyzed the existing elderly meal service model through desktop research. Secondly, we explored the problems of elderly users in the process of dining through semi-structured interviews in households and gain insight into their real needs. Then, we constructed an elderly-friendly meal service system. It solves various problems related to diets brought by aging (such as chronic disease management, lack of nutritional knowledge, etc.) by interactive designs, so that the elderly can receive meal assistance services based on their own health status, dietary preferences and other personalized needs.

Keywords: Service Design, Community Care, Meal Assistance, Older People

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003659

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