 So, please welcome our change maker, Daksh. Thank you so much for that introduction. Hi everyone. So, I am Daksh. Just a brief introduction about myself post that impressive one. I have done my bachelor's in industrial design post which I have worked as an industrial designer for a couple of years. Post which I decided to further pursue design as in practice academically. So, I enrolled myself for a master's at IIT Guwahati. The course itself was very exploratory in nature. Hence the result, this thesis. And now currently I work at Mintra as a UX designer working with their supply chain management division. So, getting right into it, my project, my thesis project for my master's was called Voices. And it's about bridging two generations. With the first part of this presentation, I'd just like to highlight this pressing issue that India is green. Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world's population over 60 years will nearly be doubled from 12% to 22%. By 2020, the number of people aged 60 years and older will be outnumbering the children younger than 5 years. So, the pace of population aging is much faster than in the past. Just a look at stats. The elderly in India currently are at about 100 million. And by 2050, they'll be about 350 million. Along with India, all countries face major challenges to ensure that their health and social systems are ready to make the most of this demographic shift. So, my next topic would be that emotional health impacts mental health. Mental health is a very known subject. WHO defines it as the general state of well-being that allows one to cope up with the normal stresses of life and make a contribution to one's own community. Emotional health is a step before this and it refers specifically to the positive and negative effects resulting from life events that contribute to one's overall mental and physical health. So, in a way, emotional health is a step before mental health and that's what this topic was all about and that's where it started. India is home to around 100 million elderly individuals currently. With better standards of living and medical breakthroughs, there is a life beyond 60s. Around 15 million of these elderly individuals are all alone today. Absence of any useful, goal-directed activity, a dull, inactive mind, hastens disability, a sense of social withdrawal and feelings of neglect. Emotional illness in this segment of the society is under-identified and often medicalized. The stigma surrounding this makes elders reluctant to seek help or communicate the same. So, my real motivation to tackle this problem began not too far from home and here you can see my grandparents frolicking with the sensational trend of fidget spinners when it hit the markets and we got them one each and they were just playing with it for a very long time. So, we belong to a very close-knit family yet over time I started noticing how unheard and neglected they were feeling and while I wanted to do everything within my reach to make them feel otherwise, I could see them spiraling down the road of critical introspection and feeling neglected as if nobody is hearing them out and they don't have a say in the family. And this sort of took me back to my English classes back in school which spoke about the seven stages of a man by William Shakespeare. For the sake of this presentation to be short, I'll just focus on the last two stages. I'll just reiterate these phrases. The sixth age shifts into lean and slippered pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose well-saved, a world too wide, for his shrunk shank and his big manly voice turning again towards childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound. Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. So, Shakespeare did not invent the idea of stages of life. Philosophers have been addressing this for millennia. Aristotle had four ages of a man and they were extended into seven ages. During the middle ages where philosophical and religious lists were usually in sevens, you would have come across the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments, the seven heavenly virtues. But anyway enough of that trivia. Getting on with what I chose to get transported back in time was that all these philosophers and poets and artists had something in common that they were acknowledging the last stage of a human's life. And they were articulating it through showing that a person's influence slowly slips away and they gradually accept their fate. So, it's an inevitable truth of aging and that's what got me started in this project. So, where it took me? So, like I told you, I was in a master's course back in Gohati and we were on a campus that was on the outskirts of the city and we were on the other side of Brahmaputra river. And there was no way to actually do user research as they say. So, I began to wonder how I could better encapsulate the problems of the targeted audience. And after interviewing a few elders within the campus and visiting nearby hospitals, I just realized that I needed a larger audience at a single space. So, it also opened up my mind about the scale at which I'd like to tackle this problem in itself. Like would it just be for my grandparents or would I want to take it further? So, I decided to go to an orphanage. Amarghar is an old age home located in Gohati which currently houses about 28 elderly individuals aged between 65 to 85 years old. And I spent a few weeks visiting them and in the process got a glimpse into their daily lives. And I interviewed a total of 9 participants over a few weeks. So, how I did that was actually we had visiting hours and we had to spend like limited amount of time. So, my mapping about the user research had to be in a very slow and steady process. And these are some of the participants that took part in my very informal interview. And yeah, so at the end of this, like any new UX designer, I thought of a knee jerk solution like which came very, very involuntarily to me. Which was the process of contextual inquiry as all UXers might know that we record statements. So, like these are some of the statements that came out of the interviews that I held with the elderly. And most of them focused towards the fact that they are alone even when they are together in a cohesive unit with the same age groups and wanting to spend time with each other, they get bored of it eventually. So, from user statements I went into my observations that they are usually optimistic about meeting their children and their grandchildren. In some cases they visit often, in some cases they have just abandoned their elderly patrons at the old age homes. And loneliness is a major issue. They are very curious to know about the outside world to explore more about what's happening outside. Apart from their daily dose of newspaper and maybe TV once like for one hour every day. So, some of the insights that I gathered was similar to my observations that long, they long to see their loved ones however sour their relationships are. They cannot rely on regular activities all the time, they usually eventually get bored of it. They are socially very active outside their ecosystem of the orphanage itself. Left. Okay. I'll just quickly take you through my insight. So, the problems that I funneled down towards low frequencies of visits by the patrons' relatives, limited avenues for engaging patrons, physical and organizational limitations and fixed venue for social interaction because their motor skills are usually not up to the mark for them to be outside. So again as a very young, very motivated UX designer, the solutions were pretty evident for me. I thought of a companion like an artificial assistant which would be virtually connected to the elderly. I thought of gamification patterns where they would keep them engaged and it will help in their cognitive reappraisal. I thought of virtual reality tours of since they can't go out so probably sitting at their own space they can have a glimpse and a taste of the world outside. But while I was discussing about these solutions during spending time with the elderly, there was a statement that struck me and it was something that really made me like look back at the problem. So one of the patrons said that these toys cannot replace time with my granddaughter. So all the solutions that I thought of and I spoke about, they were already called as toys. So after all of this, I just thought that I'll focus on, I mean the solutions were not evident anymore and I thought of fixating myself on new modes of social interaction. And the themes that I wanted to anchor my project around was connect, empower, educate, keep them young while you can. So the missing piece of the puzzle was on the other side of the social strata lie children from orphanages. Many of them have found a home and a sense of purpose through selfless efforts of non-profit organizations. However they still lack social interactions and a chance to learn about life experiences from elderly. So the project that I thought of is not something new or it's not something that has not been already done but the means to do it was something that I wanted to take a step back and think about. So the final concept was around intergenerational programming. So intergenerational programming helps in bridging the gap between the young and the old and the purpose of this is mutual benefit through planned interactions. The aim of such programs includes planning, preparing and conducting activities using evidence-based practices to achieve a wide range of educational, developmental and psychosocial benefits. So these are some of the snippets from the pilot that I carried out and how I divided it was into three phases. First was about realizing the system, then about advertising it and then about just two minutes. I'll just wrap up and then about propagating the same. So how I went about this was the system would be the identification of the stakeholders and their motivations creating an awareness video of whose snippets you've already been watching. The future scope of this was going beyond the social cause and using technology as a means to make itself sustainable. So the proposed technological solution will connect individuals willing to pitch as volunteers. So there was a system that was envisioned and how I believe to see it is something like this where the primary objective was to create interactive patterns which will help in aligning the emotional needs of the elderly and children for mutual benefit. The secondary objective was to focus on the human connect and use technology only to assist the scope like the core of this project and the stretch objective was to build a community of conscious and sensitive young individuals who would be the key to sustain the system. In reality the facilitators could keep changing whilst the connection between specific old age homes and orphanages remain intact thus creating a long term bonding between the primary users which are the children and the elderly. Thank you. Thank you. That's my thanks. I loved your initiative. That's really noble what you did. So this is a small token of appreciation on the behalf of UxIndia and all the participants here.