Nærhet

Nærhet is an in-development startup in the elderly informal care sector. The goal is to reduce loneliness using technological solutions combined with a focus on psychology and absolute ease of use solutions.

By providing senior family members a glimpse into the rest of the family's day to day activities, they feel more included and have more to talk about when meeting or calling — laying a foundation for people to talk about more substantial topics than the weather.

We do this by a simple text message based solution that reminds family members to take a picture, write a caption and upload. This in turn is made into a postcard we print and send to the senior family member. The other family members are reminded on a rotating basis to upload photos to a queue of cards we ship out infrequently.

This way we don't introduce complicated hardware or apps for the seniors, but focus on human connections instead.

While the overarching problem may be complicated and daunting, we found that the solution doesn't have to be and that very simple things go a long way. While user testing and researching, we experienced how much something as simple as a phone call meant for some. And we want to elevate that.

Personally, Nærhet is also an arena to experiment with absolute MVP methology. Conducting user testing over phone with with real-time Mixpanel analytics was a humbling experience in interface design

The project is still in an early stage, with a goal of a public release before june and funded by Innovation Norway.