Independent task completion
% of common TV tasks completed without caregiver intervention.
Research prototype: simpler navigation and safer recovery so older adults need less caregiver help.
Can a predictable TV environment help older adults recover from mistakes without calling a caregiver? EasyView tests that question with a connected TV interface, virtual remote, and caregiver app, built from family observation, focused on confidence and recovery. Research concept, not a production product.
Watching my grandmother and parents on a Smart TV, the hard part was rarely the first mistake. It was what followed: hesitation, lost confidence, a call for help. I observed both sides: the older adult trying to continue, and the caregiver becoming part of the entertainment experience.
They try first on their own. Only after repeated failures do they call a family member.
"They are not asking the help immediately. They do something. They ask help only when they cannot do it."
Even after learning the remote, button roles are forgotten. Arrows (Up, Down, Left, Right) caused the most confusion.
"She used to forget because of the cognitive overload in the remote."
"Specifically the arrows, up, down, left and right used to make a lot of confusion."
Correct presses still left her asking where am I now? An unexpected screen change broke confidence.
"Even if she tried pressing the right button, she doesn't know where she is in the interface."
Unexpected screens → assumed mistake → anxiety → call for help.
"She gets anxious."
"Raji... I did something wrong."
She wanted content now, not a lesson. Learning was secondary to watching.
"She want a quick solution."
"She want me to find her favourite program."
Voice recognition failed on pronunciation and age-related speech patterns. Trust in voice dropped.
"The voice recognition couldn't recognize her voice properly."
Unexpected events: she wanted to know why, not only get help. Understanding lowered anxiety.
"Every time something happened she asked me why this happened."
Each help request: stop work, walk to TV, fix it, return. Repeated many times a day.
"I have to stop what I'm doing every time the TV needs help."
Core signal: the problem wasn't the wrong press. It was the cost of recovering from it.
After enough wrong presses, she stops trying. She waits for a family member, or for the show to end.
Thumb hovers. Which button is safe? Which one traps her somewhere she can't leave?
One press → wrong app or a menu with no clear way back. Her channel is gone.
The fix isn't on the remote; it's a phone call. Every mistake becomes someone else's five minutes.
Next time, she doesn't try first. The remote becomes something operated on her behalf, not by her.
It erodes in four quiet steps until entertainment becomes a dependent activity.
"I know what I want to watch, but I'm afraid I'll make a mistake."
"Helping became part of the entertainment experience itself."
If system state is obvious and recovery is easy, older adults may keep going instead of calling for help.
Inconsistency across cable, live TV, and streaming, not one broken app. Rebuilding each service expands scope without fixing the behavioural gap.
Arjun connects Netflix, syncs the Tata Play box, and marks four channels as favourites, none of it touched from the TV.
Amma presses OK on the remote. The focus model, the back button, and the now-playing state all live in one shared layer, regardless of source.
What plays on the TV appears, live, as a progress bar on Arjun's phone, the same second it starts.
Screens express the decisions above: predictable navigation, low decision load, support without dependence.
Every menu asked them to make a decision they didn't want to make. One wrong tap, three screens deep, and there was no way back they could find.
Familiarity over Discovery. Recognition over Recall. Show three things. Never make them remember a path.
One screen, four huge choices, zero submenus to get lost in.
Arjun couldn't be in the living room every evening, but "helping" had quietly become his grandmother's only way to watch TV.
Independence through Support. Give the caregiver control from a distance, without making them the interface.
Arjun sees who's online, pushes a channel, or checks safety, without a single call.
A standard remote has 40+ tiny identical buttons, the confusion that surfaced early with arrows and unclear functions. Only six get used; under stress, none are easy to tell apart.
Confidence over Complexity. Fewer buttons, bigger targets, one that's impossible to miss in an emergency.
Six labeled buttons and an SOS that's never more than one glance away.
AI accelerated exploration. Research set direction. Testing decided what stayed.
For the best experience, view this prototype on a desktop or laptop screen.
Press SOS on the remote, watch the caregiver phone react instantly
Tap Push on any card in the phone's OTT tab, it opens live on the TV
Toggle Accessibility, large text and high contrast apply instantly
Two risks tested: do the three interfaces behave as one system, and can a real person complete the core flow with no walkthrough?
Systems Thinking claimed a shared-state layer across TV, remote, and caregiver app. This tests that claim: a local server runs all three at once: TV on laptop, remote on one phone, caregiver app on another, synced live on the same network. No formal participants or metrics yet. First real test that the three pieces behave as one system, not three screens pretending to connect.
All three, liveTV on laptop, caregiver app left phone, remote right: same local server, same live state. Not a mockup; the actual system running.
How it's actually runningLightweight Python server on shared Wi-Fi, same pattern as the Systems Thinking diagram, run locally. One terminal, three URLs: tv.html, remote.html, app.html: one WebSocket, live sync.
No explanation first. Just try. Four steps on the real interface, no walkthrough. Before she touched a button, I asked what Home and Back do. She already knew: Home → main screen, Back → previous. Never explained; she read it from the layout alone. Not a usability study: one person, one sitting, a handful of tasks. First time the flow lived outside my head. Only one interaction needed explaining: the confirm-before-leaving step. Everything else, she already knew.
What I asked: Can you understand what's on this screen?
What she did: She looked at it and told me, on her own, that there were four menus. No prompting.
What I asked: Can you go left and right? Can you find something under Today's Programs?
What she did: Moved between tiles without hesitation, then found and selected a program on her own.
What I asked: What would you press to play it?
What she did: Said "OK", and pressed it correctly. It played.
What I asked: What happens when you press Back?
What she did: Pressed it expecting to go back, then paused at the confirmation. "What is this?" I said it was so she wouldn't leave a show by accident. She understood, confirmed, and never hesitated on it again.
Product hypothesis, not proven outcome. Goal: after a mistake, move from immediate dependence to understandable recovery.
% of common TV tasks completed without caregiver intervention.
TV-related help requests per household per week.
% of users who recover from a mistake without asking for help.
Self-reported confidence after completing a task following an error.
Make the environment predictable, not teach every TV feature.
Sits above content sources; does not rebuild their discovery systems.
SOS is support, not healthcare or emergency response.
Reduces unnecessary interruptions; keeps the family support relationship.
Scoped to one pattern: an older adult who wants independent TV use, with intermittent family support. Deliberately narrow. It tests a hypothesis, not accessibility for every older adult.
Stopped solving “older adults and technology.” Focused on recovery after a TV mistake.
The connected prototype mattered for testing shared state and interaction assumptions, not screen count.
One informal participant can show direction; it cannot prove better confidence or independence.
Hardest part was never a screen. Resist “older adults struggle with tech” as one generic problem. Sit with two specific people in two rooms until the real problem shape appears.
SOS taught me: accessibility often isn't simplifying what's there. It's noticing what's missing. In distress, nothing needed to be simpler; something needed to exist that hadn't.
Caregiver app: remove complexity for one person, and someone else carries it. Good design doesn't pretend complexity vanishes. It decides whose shoulders it belongs on.