Designing Smart Home Controls for Elderly

As technology advances, the idea of a "smart home" gets implemented more and more, and offers multiple ways to help people managing their homes. This offers a big opportunity to help elderly people with their daily lives. However, most feel overwhelmed by modern technology and opt out of using it at all. This thesis provides an alternative take on a Smart Home remote control. After collecting, discussing and evaluating several design principles and guidelines we propose two possible concept remotes and corresponding mock-ups, that are subjected to an evaluation by elderly people to choose the one they prefer. This preferred model will be along with proposed improvements made into a functional prototype and, again, be evaluated by the elderly. The final prototype was received positively and additional improvements are proposed.