Co-designing an Embodied e-Coach With Older Adults: The Tangible Coach Journey

This article presents a tangible interface for an e-coach, collaboratively designed across four countries to meet the needs of older adults. The device's aim is to provide coaching through personalized recommendations, tasks, and foster empathy via vocal, visual, and physical interactions. The co-design process involved collecting user insights and translating them into design requirements for physical, interaction, and privacy aspects. The requirements were transformed into three design concepts, which were evaluated by the target user group. The final design was implemented and tested in three countries, and the article discusses the outcomes, challenges, and potential for designing physical e-coaches for older adults, with research outputs shared in an open-source repository.