CRII:CHS:Promoting Connectedness and Wellbeing through Healthful Eating

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This research addresses how to use communication about eating and health, among the elderly, as a basis for promoting connectedness and wellbeing. In the United States, more than 40% of older adults live alone, experiencing loneliness and isolation. These feelings, along with the physical and psychological changes associated with aging, can prevent people from engaging in managing or improving their health and wellbeing. How to promote connectedness and relationship building between older adults and their support group living apart from them, by focusing on the social experience around eating and meal preparation, will be investigated. The research adopts the concept of healthful eating – connected processes that constitute the social experiences of food consumption – to examine how design can transform everyday practices to generate meaningful experiences of social connectedness. The research seeks to positively impact older adults’ engagement with everyday health activities, empower them to exchange knowledge of health practices, and improve awareness of health and wellbeing.The research has two aims: (1) identify strategies of sharing and communicating healthful eating experiences through participatory design; and (2) develop and evaluate systems to support social connectedness and relationship bonding through the sharing of healthful eating experiences. The research team will adopt participatory design approaches to understand older adults’ eating and meal preparation experiences. The findings will serve as the basis for generating a set of prompts and strategies to motivate people to engage in collecting and sharing healthful eating practices and defining a set of design principles for incorporating technology. The research team will then focus on the iterative design, development, and evaluation of systems in-situ. By leveraging the social aspects of eating and meal preparation experiences, the research focuses on designs to supplement and encourage older adults to share and exchange personal experience and stories with the support groups who live apart from them. An expected output is a set of evidence-based design principles for promoting connectedness and wellbeing through healthful eating.Broad Impacts will be derived in conjunction with intellectual merit through collaboration with the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement. The research team will participate in community working meetings and lead MiniU sessions to translate and disseminate research findings with older adults. Students from underrepresented groups will be engaged through work with the IU Center of Excellence for Women in Technology and Proactive Health REU site.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.