Building of Usage Scenarios Space for Investigating the Fall Situations of the Elderly People.

Summary Assessing the number of users defined by a set of specific usage attributes in a given usage contextual situation is not always an obvious task in a market segmentation process. Although new approaches in design and marketing seem to be more sensitive to the adequacy of a design concept with the usage scenarios, these methods do not systematically consider the various usage situations. The present article puts forward a methodology intending to build a usage scenarios space in which the input data is thoroughly collected and validated. This methodology is applied to the complex and multifactorial issue of falls among the elderly in the Metropolitan France. In this paper, numerous medical publications have been made to study influential factors of fall situations. However, even solution providers for fall prevention and teleassistance ignore the real situational coverage of their solutions. As a result, “usage scenarios space” is built using an appropriate segmentation of usage contexts (here, fall situations) and user characteristics. These data are used for a design oracle to predict (simulate) the various and multiple usage scenarios.Copyright © 2013 by ASME.