| Summary: | Purpose The rapid growth of cloud-based ICT technology provides a convenient tool to design innovative services for seniors1. Students interested in gerontechnology must be aware of the fundamentals of aging psychology and cloud technologies. We offer a full semester course to train students from across disciplines to observe and understand the physical and psychological needs of seniors so that they can design and implement ICT products. Students work together to identify a problem and to propose and design a solution. Method This course lasts for eighteen weeks. It is taught by two instructors: one from the Clinical Psychology Department, who is responsible for psychology of aging topics2; and the other from the Computer Science and Information Engineering Department, who is responsible for teaching about cloud technology. Five speakers from the industry give lectures about real world scenarios and design principals. An hour-long lab or group discussion is scheduled after each lecture. Teaching assistants provide aid during the discussion. Students from different disciplines are grouped randomly before proposing an individual product/service proposal3. After the mid-term presentation, the topics converge to six categories, and the final project teams are formed. All content of this course is recorded and shared online. Students write web-based notes4 and discuss their lab/project in the Facebook groups after class. Results & Discussion 39 students and 2 teaching assistants participated this course in the Fall 2013. Topics of the final project included: (i) Food light tunnel (Figure 3, food and light recording and prescription service); (ii) Memory-Assisted multifunction watch (Figure 4); (iii) Game-based cognitive evaluation for elders on Pad; (iv) Aging Battle Club (A social calendar APP); (v) Intelligent cane and umbrella for elders; and (vi) I have whatever you want (Dementia assisted platform). Four teams created prototypes, and two teams presented a scenario and workflow. The presentations were shared on Youtube5. Students provided strong positive feedback in their course evaluations.
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