Project-A-Friend | Virtually connecting the elderly with their loved ones during the isolation of COVID-19.

What is the problem you found?

Members of the Greater Bendigo community need a way to connect with their loved ones without seeing them in person because their mental wellbeing is negatively impacted by COVID 19 restrictions. Nursing home visits have also been restricted, negatively affecting the mental health of residents and their families. Our question is, how might we connect individuals in isolation with their loved ones?

Customer / Problem

We expect to have a largely elderly demographic for this product, this is why we have valued user-friendliness and accessibility in our design. These aspects will also contribute to the development of independence for older people during this time when they have limited assistance.

The elderly are experiencing isolation and loneliness. They miss seeing their families and feel like they don't know when this sense of isolation will end.

What Is Your Solution?

Project-A-Friend is a sustainably made, user-friendly projector that allows community members to connect safely, in a way that feels normal. From our interviews, we identified many community members were struggling to connect with loved ones in a way that felt genuine and allowed them peace-of-mind. This projector and accompanying app will improve the wellbeing of users by allowing them to communicate clearly and easily with their friends and family.

While looking into the design of our prototype, we were very focussed on sustainability, this prompted a lot of learning throughout the process of planning our product design. We learned about the different mechanisms inside projectors and the ways in which plastic can be recycled.

Our point of difference is sustainability and user-friendliness, we plan on having a product that is made of at least 80%

carbon neutral materials, our app will be very easy to use and the features will be large to assist users with vision loss.

Support Required

Connections

We are considering VR and AR technology with our features so advice on how that would practically work would also be useful.

Advice

Advice on the users we would target first would be great!