Design And Development Of Elderly Sleep Aid Products Based On Co-Design

Population aging is a general trend of world population development.Since China entered an aging society at the end of the 20th century,population aging has become increasingly severe and the number of aging populations has continued to grow.From 2000 to the end of 2021,the number of elderly people over the age of 60 increased from 129 million to 267 million.And the proportion of elderly people in the total population increased from 10.2%in 2000 to 18.9%.This has led to increasingly major health problems for the elderly.As a necessary life activity,the problems caused by sleep have become widespread among the elderly,which seriously affects the daily activities and physical and mental health of the elderly population.Therefore,studying the sleep problems of the elderly and designing and developing a product that can solve the sleep problems of the elderly can improve their quality of life of the elderly and ensure their physical and mental health of the elderly.The co-design has brought an opportunity to solve the problem of sleep in the elderly.The causes of sleep problems in the elderly are different,such as cultural level,personal habits,and living environment,which will lead to significant differences.Co-design can fully tap the user’s needs in the design stage and promote open discussions among various participants to obtain the design goals that best meet the user’s needs.During the design process,participants can also share decisions to jointly build the design vision and scheme of the entire product to ensure that the product does not deviate from the original goal during the design process.After the product design is completed,collaborative design can better complete the iterative optimization of the product.This research uses co-design to identify the sleep problems of the elderly,formulate the design strategy of the elderly sleep aid products,and complete the design work of the elderly sleep aid products.This study firstly sorts out the characteristics of sleep aid products currently on the market based on literature reading and competitive product analysis.In this way,we discover the popularization of sleep aid products on the market and then use cultural probes to explore the individualized sleep problems in the elderly.Matching these individualized issues with the popularization of sleep aid products in the market focuses the design issue on designing a product that improves sleep quality for the elderly by soothing their emotions.Secondly,brainstorming is used to obtain 34 effective sleep resources for the elderly.On this basis,two generative symposiums are used to complete the collaborative design practice with the elderly,and the design strategy of sleep aid products for the elderly is formulated by matching emotional needs with sleep resources.Then complete the following design work according to the design strategy:(1)the control process of sleep aid products is designed for aging.(2)the system design of sleep aid products that act on the three stages of the elderly before falling asleep,during sleep and after waking up.(3)The two core product designs of sleep aid watch and sleep aid pillow.Finally,elderly users who did not participate in the early collaborative practice were selected to participate in the design evaluation to verify the effectiveness of the design.