Welcome

As people get older, there is the risk that elderly gradually dissociate themselves from society. Communication can become an obstacle in maintaining and controlling social relationships. Relationships with other people give happiness and support, but also a sense of belonging and that elderly have a role to play in society, where exclusion and loneliness have a strong negative impact. This project explores positive solutions for this problem by introducing an interactive system: the KeyPing.

The imaginative power of the KeyPing board in combination with a personal configuration of the ThinKeys enables elderly to social interact with their beloved ones beyond their immediate physical surroundings. Through explicit actions of the user and perceptible activity of the contacts, the KeyPing system facilitates a feeling of social connectedness: a momentary affective experience of belonging and relatedness – integral to wellbeing. You can find a broad explanation of the system and the features in the final design section

This blog gives insight in the process of the KeyPing system that is developed by Robert Leufkens,  Mariska Rooth and Tristan Weevers; three masterstudents of the University of Technology Delft, the Netherlands. Check the starting point page for more information about the history of the project. The KeyPing system will be presented at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in San Francisco in September 2009. Please feel free to comment on any post and to contact us through idf2009nl@gmail.com 🙂

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Working principle KeyPing

New content

September 21:

From San Francisco, we would like to tell you about the latest updates on our website. Recently, an article in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad appeared and we made our final presentation stuff.

September 13:

• All past data on testing and research is settled under development. No data has been changed in the transfer
• New pages about the final design and presentation are added and partly filled with information about the new Keyping system
• A new banner is added, with our logo, slogan and a small picture of the prototype
• The text and images on the homepage are rewritten and matches the current state of the KeyPing project

August 16:

• We found some interesting articles on social connectedness
• The idea section is fully updated: check out the videos of our phidget prototyping!
• The further we go, the more inspiration we get: Low resolution surface animation and Activity and visuals pages have new videos
• Test 3, 4 and 5 are finalized and the conclusions are quite interesting 🙂
• As we speak, we are busy to narrow down our findings and develop KeyPing 2.

We’ll keep you posted!

July 14:

We have uploaded some nice videos about other projects, visuals, sound and light to use as an inspiration for our project. An other thing we are doing for inspiration is making photographs of different bunch of keys, because we are still looking for options that are moveable/mobile. We already have some ideas for this and will be presented as soon as possible.

We started with the first two tests. A small setup and overview of the test materials is presented on the tests page.