| dc.description.abstract | BACKGROUND: Seniors, in this case 67 plus years, are the fastest growing demographic group in Norway. The people in this group have a high risk for falling, where one out of three has at least one fall incident each year. The fall incidents often leads to injuries and reduced quality of life, and even reduced lifetime expectancy. The falls are not just making the seniors suffer, a publication by the The Norwegian Directorate of Health about fall prevention, stated that around 80\% of all accidents and injuries among seniors are directly linked to fall, costing the society about three billions Norwegian kroners annually. A preliminary study to this thesis, conducted fall 2014, showed that exercise, more particularly strength and balance exercise, can be a great intervention to prevent falls. Another important finding was that none of the papers, found by doing a literature review, did document neither the use of any user acceptance tests, or any inclusion of the users in the development process. OBJECTIVE: The objective for this Master's Thesis is to develop concepts that would encourage physical activity, with the use of \gls{ict}, in order to reduce the risk for falling among seniors. RESEARCH METHOD: The report starts out by elaborating the problem at hand, and presents several commercialized exercise concepts. This is followed by a systematic literature review, aiming to illuminate the \gls{sota} within seniors, \gls{ict} and training. A workshop with active seniors, consisting of a focus group used to investigate their motivations, challenges and general thoughts about \gls{ict} and physical activity, and a co-design session where participants came up with ideas to a concept were conducted. Ideas from participants and results from literature review were used to develop concepts by making mockups. Our developed concepts were then evaluated by two experts through semi-structured interviews. RESULTS: The conducted literature review, about \gls{ict}, exercise and seniors, shows that seniors are not included in development processes, which also supports one of the findings from the preliminary study. We also found that few of the papers did discuss fall as an important part of the interventions. Our workshop with the seniors gave us valuable insight in the seniors everyday life. Our participants were three active seniors, who reported that their main motivation for doing physical activity was simply to get a better life. As we also saw among the commercialized exercise applications and literature review, the seniors from the workshop were focusing on endurance exercise. We learned that they did conduct some strength exercise as well, but none were especially focusing on balance training. The concepts that we developed can be seen as a result itself, but it also proved to be an excellent platform for discussing seniors with experts. We found several similarities, but also some differences when we compared experts' and seniors' opinions, especially when it comes to how they focus on fall and what kind of activities the seniors should do to prevent fall. | |
