Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSIn April 2015, 10 older adults from Italy and from the Netherlands will start using the complete ChefMyself system within the comfort of their own homes. Older adults have been involved in the design and development of ChefMyself from onset. Now it is time to test the full-fledged solution.
The trials will happen in two different rounds in both countries and they will include end-users who mirror the characteristics of the target groups that have been defined within the course of the project. In this first round there are women and men participants and people with varying cooking experience. This will provide the opportunity of assessing the impact of the solution in different user profiles. The second round will start later this year, again with 10 participants across Italy and the Netherlands.
During the trial period, participants will have the opportunity to accept or edit weekly meal plan recommendations, use the automatic shopping list generator to help when going out for groceries shopping or learning more about healthy eating choices. One major feature is the automatic setting of speed, temperature and time on the kitchen robot, rendering the human-machine interaction much simpler – the user just has to follow the steps in the recipe and hit “go”. After an effortless preparation of a healthy and tasty recipe, users can then share it on a social network purposefully designed to bring older adults together around the issues of healthy eating and, thus, prevent isolation.
Throughout the project numerous usability tests were conducted in order to design the smoothest possible interaction with the system. The trials will add information about technology acceptance and user experience, which will help make the case for this solution to be quickly brought to market.
ChefMyself is co-funded by the European Commission under the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme and the participating partner states involved in the project.