PersonAAL
Full Title
Personalized web applications to improve quality of life and remote care for older adultsDescription
In Europe as in other developed countries, there is an increasing number of elderly people. While this demographic trend is generally regarded as a positive signal of improved living conditions, at the same time there is the need of providing adequate support to such increasing number of ageing people in order to cope with the increased risk of developing health diseases in later life. In addition, increased life expectancy combined with declining birth rates have caused many to worry about the cost and sustainability of supporting this growing ageing population in the next future.
In this scenario, the main goal of PersonAAL is extending the time older people can live in their home environment by increasing their autonomy and assisting them in carrying out activities of daily living by means of intelligent and intuitive web applications enabling users to receive personalized and context-dependent assistance directly in their own homes with the goal to improve quality of life and decrease healthcare delivery cost.
The technological platform developed in the project will support controlling/monitoring daily elderly activities by exploiting a number of different sensors, devices and modalities. One of the innovations of our technological platform will be the fact that it will be capable of providing interactive and proactive solutions anticipating elderly needs, and dynamically adapting/ accommodating individual user requirements to changes in different contexts of use. By using a combination of multiple modalities and devices appropriate for the current context of use, our system will support a natural interaction with older people: the selection of the most suitable combination of modalities/devices will be done by analyzing the current context, user’s characteristics and current task.
We plan to apply and integrate these concepts in a set of care applications in order to validate the results in a realistic settings and show their generality.
The applications considered will be Remote assistance, Personal Medical Diary and Rehabilitation service.
In order to improve users comfort and motivation, and so to broaden effective use of the developed applications, seniors (our primary end-users) will be involved from the beginning of the project through focus groups or interviews in order to collect their requirements and early feedbacks about how to exploit context-dependent, interactive services.