Living Noise to Combat Loneliness Amongst Older UK Adults - First Insights

Loneliness is rising amongst several age groups in several countries with older UK adults being one of the affected populations. Early work from South Korea on the use of a network of social robots exchanging activity information between different households, so-called ‘living noise’, yielded positive results in incentivizing communication between young professionals, thereby reducing loneliness. In this short article, we report the results of a co-design workshop held with lonely, older UK adults that aimed to determine the potential of adoption of living noise transmission amongst this population. The results were encouraging and will feed into future work involving the deployment of robots and virtual avatars in people’s homes.