The SenseChair: The lounge chair as an intelligent assistive device for elders Abstract The elder population is rising. In the United States, the number of those needing assistance far exceeds the number of care facilities available to help the aging population. This creates a great incentive to help elders remain independently in their homes. Our group is exploring how robotic technology, designed in forms as familiar as home appliances, might be used to assist elders and those who provide care. We have designed the SenseChair, an intelligent assistive lounge chair that brings assistive technology to elders in a comfortable and familiar fashion. The SenseChair takes information about a sitter’s behavior and the environment and provides information ranging from ambient displays to explicit notification. It serves as a research platform to understand how we can help elders stay independently in their homes, and offer them physical, social, and emotional support. Keywords Interaction design, product design, elders, user research, ethnographic research, furniture, assistive robotics Problem statement Our Project on People and Robots [1] is researching the design of compelling robotic products for the aging Jodi Forlizzi Human-Computer Interaction Institute and School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University Carl DiSalvo School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University John Zimmerman Human-Computer Interaction Institute and School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University Bilge Mutlu Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Amy Hurst Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright © 2005 AIGA | The professional association for design.