Wisdom

Inspiration

I work for an NGO in my free time. One day we were asked to deliver some food to an old age home. There I saw a lot of old people who looked really bored and lonely. I asked a lot of them what they do to burn time. A lot of them told they stare at the wall! This actually made me feel sad. I asked them why dont they call up their kids. They told that their kids abandoned them and didnt want to spend much on them
I personally know a lot of my friends who would love to talk to these people in their free time. So, BOOM, Wisdom hit my mind!

We are a young population today and it is believed that in the coming decades, the number of people above 50 years old is going to increase by 250%.
The study (SREF) suggested that, in general, older people are looking for two things out of their social connections: they want to be listened to and they want to make a contribution.
Data from The Canadian census shows that 24.6% of seniors aged 65 and above, now live alone with no family or friends. This can be treacherous as according to the Administration of Aging these seniors that are over the age of 65, have an average life expectancy to live for another 20 years on their own.
In fact, a study by PAN Healthcare found that over 64% of the elderly in India suffer from loneliness, with this condition being worse in urban regions
The Covid-19 pandemic has played a crucial role in the faster adoption of electronic gadgets among the senior population.

Hence, it is necessary to find meaningful ways for older folks to give back to the community

Wisdom is an app that lets elders connect with like minded volunteers according to their active time.
Elders can send messages requesting volunteers for a talk on the app.
Volunteers can instantly connect with an elder based on their availability and interests.
Since old people love sharing stories and knowledge, The app has rooms. Elders can start a room and allow other like minded people to join and listen to them.
Google authentication so that people with fake date of births trying to acccess the app can be reduced.
The elder and volunteers can change their active time and interests anytime on the app!
Since the possibility of abuse and harassment is pretty high, we have included a report button on the profile page

The prototype and flow diagrams representing the user story and app were made on Figma and Miro.

There are still a lot of edge cases that is to be considered
Dilemna on whether to include dark mode
Confusion between several iterations of the screen
Since user behavior of older people is a little more difficult to predict, it was challenging to develop more effective user flows and diagrams

I was able to complete the user flow stories and diagrams within a week.( Thanks to sleepless nights).
I also extensively researched about the issues of old people for about 2 days to understand their pain points more.

The thing i learned during this process is that Old people are heavily ignored. Inspite of their experiences and services, they are not considered to be important by a large fraction of the population. Aging can be a tough process alone. So my aim was to make aging a collaborative process by just lending them our ear!

As of now this is just an idea. Hopefully this becomes a reality since this is highly feasilble. I could perform A/B testing and usability testing.
Various new features such as Organising activities, Playing games, Sending food etc can be implemented in the app

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