Martina Uhlig

Senior User Experience Consultant at UID

Martina Uhlig

Senior User Experience Consultant at UID

Biography

Martina Uhlig is a Senior User Experience Consultant at UID Berlin. Apart from designing software applications with clients, she works on research projects where she explores how to combine digital information with everyday objects and bringing computation into the physical world. She is an enthusiastic maker and experiments with microcontrollers and novel materials.

At Wear It Festival 2017, she will present wearables from the project “inDAgo” which encourages senior citizens to stay active and mobile. The research project dealt with how to support seniors with technology beyond smartphones: The goal was to create technology that would be as invisible as possible and very easy to use. The result was a system of different wearables – ranging from a smart armband to a smart jacket.

Because of physical limitations that come with age, seniors are often afraid to navigate the city on foot or public transport: They are afraid that they might hurt themselves or appear vulnerable to their environment in unfamiliar places. At the same time, staying home makes people feel isolated and lonely. To counteract this, we created different wearables – e.g. a smart jacket which guides the wearer to a location without anyone noticing that the wearer is using assistive technology: The wearer puts an NFC badge for a certain location in their pocket and whenever he should take a turn, he feels a soft vibration on the corresponding shoulder.