Incidental Interaction: Technology to Support Elder Strength Training through Everyday Movements
Strength training is a key determinant of healthy aging, yet adherence to formal exercise programs among older adults remains low. While many technologies aim to encourage physical activity in older adults, they typically rely on dedicated devices, wearables, or explicit exercise tasks. They therefore do not embed task practice into daily life. Our new approach, termed Incidental Interaction, instead transforms everyday actions into opportunities for deliberate strength building. It thereby operationalizes everyday movements such as sitting, standing, or lifting objects as strength exercises, encouraging participants to repeat them to build functional capacity. This repetition is encapsulated in the phrase "do it twice", and is combined with movement quality metrics to provide feedback and support progression, without requiring users to adopt new routines or equipment. We illustrate the concept by designing and implementing an ecosystem of instrumented everyday objects and pressure-sensitive mats embedded into ordinary furniture, providing real-time feedback, progress tracking, and motivational cues. To evaluate technical efficacy, we report on two structured pilot deployments with elders (2 week and 4 week studies, n=7).