Chatting with grandma

Delta and Delft Integraal often write about innovative ideas that offer big promises for the future. But what has happened to such ideas a couple years on? What for instance has happened to ‘Piece of Family’, a multimedia device for the elderly that Sanne Kistemaker designed two years ago?

(Photo: Hans Stakelbeek/FMAX)

Delta, 1-11-2007
‘Sanne Kistemaker has won the ‘Design for All Award’ for a communication device for the elderly’

For many elderly people it is difficult to surf the internet, yet at the same time it is completely normal for their grandchildren to use the web to stay in touch with friends and relatives. To close the gap between the different generations on the internet, Sanne Kistemaker designed ‘Piece of Family’, a multimedia device that makes it easy for the elderly to go online and communicate with relatives through a weblog.

‘Piece of Family’ consists of a book, a writing pad and a scanner. Grandparents for instance write messages to their families on the writing pad. They then scan these messages and post them online, via a cordless internet connection, on a specially created ‘family page’, which the elderly can also view on their televisions. The grandchildren use a computer to visit the same family page to read the scanned, hand-written messages from grandma or grandpa, and they can then type a reply. “With ‘Piece of Family’, both generations use what they’re most familiar with to communicate”, industrial designer Kistemaker says. “And by doing so they can stay in touch with each other.”
Recently Kistemakers invention won a design award for the third time. “That’s great,” says Kistemaker, who designed the device two years ago as a graduation assignment. “But unfortunately it’s still not on the market.
Vodafone was interested for a while, but they decided not to produce it, because they came to the conclusion that hardware was not their core business.”

Kistemaker is now close to making a deal with TU Delft, in which a YESDelft company could put it on the market. “The design, concept, functionality and interaction level is all there,” she explains. “We know how the elderly use it, because of my research. But there are also things that still need to be done. ‘Piece of Family’ must be cordless, because the elderly could trip over a cord, and this makes the device more expensive. ‘Piece of Family’ should cost no more than three hundred euro, or half of what you pay for a laptop. But we have to be quick to put it on the market. The elderly of today don’t know how to use computers, but that’s a temporary problem. The elderly of the future will be more familiar with computers, so it’s important to put a spin-off on the market as soon as possible.”