Summaries of the Projects aal-2009-2 (ict based solutions for Advancement of Social Interaction of Elderly People)

The Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme

Contents

AAL-2009-2-067

The general objective of the 3rd LIFE project is to improve the social interaction of elderly people without specific cognitive problems or diseases, through the development and validation of a ICT computer-based simulated environment technology with functionalities that will allow them to social interaction, communication (even from the virtual to the real world) and also multi-user virtual activities related to learning, serious gaming and various hobbies, with friends, family, other elderly and even people of younger generations. Always starting from the point of view, preferences, limitations and needs of the specific final users target group, the 3rD-Life project aim is to create a 3D virtual environment allowing the end users to, from their own homes and with only a common PC and an Internet connection, access to a virtual world where the users can establish social relationships with known or new persons, learn new things through e-learning tools, look up the latest news, play games, etc. Starting from the basis of an already existing 3D platform, several developments will be made for implementing all these functionalities and applications.

Project duration: 24 months Web site: www.aal-alias.eu

Involved countries/national agencies: ES (ISCIII), SI, PL, ES (MiTYC), AT

Total project cost: € 1,7 million Grant € 0,8 million EC contribution € 0,32

AAL-2009-2-049

The objective of the project Adaptable Ambient LIving ASsistant (ALIAS) is the product development of a mobile robot system that interacts with elderly users, monitoring and providing cognitive assistance in daily life, and also promoting social inclusion by creating connections to people and events in the wider world. The system is designed for people living at home alone or in care facilities such as nursing homes. The function of ALIAS is to keep the user linked into widely society and in this way improve quality of life by combating loneliness and increasing cognitively stimulating activities. ALIAS is embodied by a mobile robot platform with the capacity to monitor, interact and access information from the Web, but without manipulation capabilities. ALIAS is not designed to replace human-human contacts, but rather, to enhance and promote it through the wide range of integrated services. By serving as a monitor, a cognitive-prosthetic device and a facilitator of social contacts the ALIAS system can significantly improve the daily life of elderly people. The consortium consists of a well-balanced mix of highly experienced researchers, developers, business partners and user-groups and aims at integrating a commercial pilot that unites all state-of-the-arte communication media, i.e. (video-) telephone with answering machine, television set, radio, music-box and modern on-line services, e.g. chat tools, Skype, internet-browsing. The second unique selling point is a Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) that will be included in order to train and preserve the mental functions of its user. In addition, a novel cognitive, fault tolerant and adaptable user interface concept is introduced to ensure a good usability and avoiding that people have fear to do any harm to such a system. ALIAS's proactive behaviour will ensure that the user stays in contact with his surroundings and gets mentally stimulated by adapting to the changing needs, caused by the aging process.

Project duration: 36 months web site: www.aal-alias.eu

Involved countries/national agencies: DE, FR, AT, DE, LUX, DE

Total project cost: € 3,9 milion Grant € 2,3 milion EC contribution € 0,9 milion

AAL-2009-2-091

Elderly people have limited mobility and are often bound to their home, many times being geographically separated from their friends and family. They often lose connection to their beloved ones and friends, becoming socially isolated and lonely. This situation still bears an unsolved dilemma for Europe’s society. However, the key determinant of quality of life at any age is social engagement as impaired social engagement is linked with health problems including depression and suicide. The overall objective of ALICE is to support the quality of life, well-being, social interaction and connectivity of elderly people in their home environments. The challenge addressed within ALICE is to prepare these elder years to become acceptable, meaningful and socially enjoyable. ALICE will research, develop and integrate a set of ICT based services into the existing TV set, allowing elderly people to enjoy experiences of communication and social interaction based on ICT. By doing this, ALICE will lead the way for elder people to distantly share moments of enjoyment, laughter and fun in a similar way as they were together face-to-face. The objectives are summarized as follows: O1: To investigate current communication practices of elder people. O2: To simplify electronic communication based on novel and existing technology in fields like TV and video conferencing. O3: To optimise visual user interfaces and related input devices for use by elderly people O4: To develop, test and comprehensively evaluate pilot Web applications, focusing on social networking and “togetherness”. O5: To investigate business issues in order to guarantee also maximum commercial impact of the research results.
Project duration: 24 months Web site: www.aal-alice.eu

Involved countries/national agencies: AT, NL, ES (MiTYC),

Budget: Total project cost: € 1,77 million Grant € 1,1 million EC contribution € 0,43 million
AMCOSOP

AAL-2009-2-047

AMbient COmmunication and Sense Of Presence (AMCOSOP) system aims to reduce loneliness and fears of independently living elderly by providing its users sense of presence of their family, friends, and health care personnel, i.e. so called safety net, and assuring that the elderly people are never left alone. The system encourages people to stay in contact with other people by providing, as the simplest form, availability information of possible and known communication partners in an ambient way and in this way the system promotes to maintain its users’ social connections with their safety net people. In this project the software platform for managing the communication and user friendly terminal devices are developed. Information from the safety net people are collected and brought in visible form for elderly people giving them ability to decide when to have social connections or other activities or service provided by the system. End users from three countries are joined to the project as they play a key role in the development of the user friendly interfaces and systems. User centered design methods are utilized and end users are strongly involved to the project already at the beginning for the user needs survey, continuing throughout the project as user interface and system utilization checks, and finally culminating to the user evaluation studies of the developed system. With the system it is also possible to join independently living people to the service networks available in their region. As a new system is developed there are natural business opportunities for system developers, system administrators as well as for system service integrators in local areas, which provide great opportunities for small and regional elderly care, service, or seniority housing providers in Europe to adopt AMCOSOP system for their use and that way join people to clusters already having services and activities.

Project duration: 30 months Web site:

Involved countries/national agencies: FI, AT, GR,

Total project cost: € 2,18 million Grant € 1,4 million EC contribution € 0,55 million

AAL-2009-2-136

The AWARE project aims at developing an effective solution at the European level for social inclusion of 63M retired elderly people (REP) and at preparing 38M older workers (OW) for transition to retirement. This will be attained by training in the use of ICTs for social participation and by providing an ICT-based tool that can enable social interaction of both groups to promote an active aging and to fight against consequences of retirement such as depression, loneliness and isolation. At present, REP is the population segment presenting the lowest use of the Internet and ICT technologies despite being one of the population groups presenting the highest potential on their use. OW demand an improvement on its quality of work (due to loss physical and mental skills), and on its work-life balance (due to the transitional stage before retirement. Thus, in order to address these issues and prevent their psycho-social consequences, AWARE project will develop a new Social Network hosted on a telematic platform to provide innovative services to the targeted groups, contributing to their social inclusion, to EU policies towards the aging society and supporting companies in the management of the needs of the ageing workforce. AWARE consortium will achieve this by the consecution of the following specific objectives: - To develop an accessible, user-oriented platform that will include social networking tools (chat, blogging, common interests groups, etc.) implementing the Mahara ePortfolio system, embedded with Moodle-based modules. -To develop an accessible, Moodle-based learning system for training REP and OW in the use of the platform. -To Build a Knowledge Management and Sharing module, Moodle-based, enabling a proactive participation of REP and OW in the use of the platform. -To provide innovative services enabling flexible workplaces and adaptations of home environments, through participatory ergonomics principles, resulting on the improvement of their quality of life.

Project duration: 36 months Web site: http://aware.ibv.org

Involved countries/national agencies: ES (ISCIII), ES (MiTYC), IT, UK, DE

Total project cost: € 1,26 million Grant € 0,7 million EC contribution € 0,27 million

Co-LIVING

AAL-2009-2-097

The main goal of the proposed project is the development of an ICT-based Virtual Collaborative Social Living Community for Elderly (Co-LIVING) people, aiming to stimulate and prolong their independent and active living in an outward environment through an advancement in elderly people social interaction, contributing thus positively to their wellbeing. Co-LIVING is based on an innovative Social Community network (SoCo-net), integrating different mobile wireless ICT based services addressing the elderly social interaction context categories of Care & Wellness, Guidance and Mobility monitoring. The solution will utilize and scale up the successfully developed FP6 mPower open source middleware platform (http://sourceforge.net/projects/free-mpower/) to be applicable to the elderly social community interaction field achieving thus the expected Co-LIVING time-to-market perspective of 2 to 3 years after the project end. Co-LIVING target group is the big group of healthy elderly or with light physical or psychological health problems who are self-supporting, able to move around, and can still contribute actively. They find pleasure in getting help or stimulation to be active in an outward environment. The aim of choosing the specific target group is to prevent, or reduce the risk, that these people are spending most of their time at home as they get older for a variety of accumulated (physical, psychological, psycho-social and cultural) reasons. Two well selected use cases, where elderly people can live with the greatest possible independence and activity are considered in Co-LIVING: a Living Village and the (physical) neighborhood of their home environment in a local community. Two pilots, in the Netherlands and Norway, representing the two different use cases, will be carried out in which the Co-LIVING solution will be assessed and validated by considering its social, economic and psychological dimensions.

Project duration: 36 months Web site:

Involved countries/national agencies: NL, CY, NO, PT, ES (MiTYC)

Total project cost: € 3,8 million Grant € 2,7 million EC contribution € 1,05 million

CVN Network

AAL-2009-2-187

Based upon the latest, H.264 Scalable Video Coding standard, easy access to fast internet and moderate prices for high speed hardware, our consortium propose to link groups of senior citizens into a client-server designed video communications network, coined Connected Vitality, the Personal Telepresence Network (CVN). The goal of the project is to have a small scale CVN network operational that is highly rewarded by elderly to fulfil meaningful social contacts and is intuitively suited for their needs and abilities. The technology enables elderly to gain autonomous tele-presence at any time; Allows elderly to have their individual needs and interests as a starting point for all their video and audio communications; Allows elderly to interact with family, friends and other elderly in a natural and seamless way, unhindered by technological barriers; Group video communication formats like games, reading to grandchildren, group discussions etc., enabled by the CVN network, will act as a catalyst to create virtual communities, stimulating elderly restricted to poor social environments into social meaningful activities; Creating a generic open communication model with strong building blocks inviting third parties to create their own add-on modules, developing the network into a main infrastructure for all kind of social and care needs; Once implemented, we believe this ground-breaking video-technology will empower senior citizens far beyond current possibilities and help them to overcome social restraints, impaired mobility and isolation, so many suffer from today.

Project duration: 36 months Web site: www.connectedvitality.eu

Involved countries/national agencies: NL, CY, ES (ISCIII), SE, AT, HU, IL

Total project cost: € 2,5 milion Grant € 1.9 milion EC contribution € 0,7 million

E2C

AAL-2009-2-094

The objective for the E2C consortium is to transform the proven concept of the Storytable® working in an institutional frame, and develop, test and deploy a personal version valuable in a setting of the private home. This is done by applying specific, relevant media-content and social media principles (as seen on for instance YouTube and Facebook) which are not broadly used by elderly people today. With personal storytelling as an enabler for unfolding one’s own creative potential as a driver for story- and interest-based social interactions among elderly people and the caring community the personal story table helps making elderly people living more joyful and satisfying lives. The Express to Connect (E2C) proposal addresses the overall European challenge of preventing loneliness and isolation amongst elderly people as stated in this AAL-call. The E2C solution is targeted at a point in the service ecology (value chain) where it can contribute to a decrease in care- and health related sociable costs, and a rise in life quality among elderly people. There is no tradition for stipulating the sociable cost of loneliness and isolation among elderly people. Never the less it seems to be of great relevance to advance it this area. The E2C project will as an integrated part of the project develop clear estimates of the cost of loneliness and isolation, and thereby create a firm understanding of the commercial potential in an E2C solution preventing loneliness. The consortium will apply a user-driven innovation approach to the development of the new solution, that ensure the final result will be alligned with important needs of elderly people in risk of loneliness and isolation.

Project duration: 36 months Web site: www.express2connect.org

Involved countries/national agencies: DK, NL, FI, SE, SE

Total project cost: € 3,17 million Grant € 1,78 million EC contribution € 0,7 million

EasyReach

AAL-2009-2-117

The proposed project is an innovative and sustainable ICT solution to allow elderly and less educated people to participate in the benefits of IT-based social interactions. The project will build a system, called EasyReach, that supports many styles of social interaction between users. The hardware will be very simple: a remote control resembling a small TV remote but capable of capturing user’s gestures and of taking pictures; the remote will use radio frequency instead of infrared light. The software will run in a set-top box that has a DVB-T decoder, a GSM/UMTS modem and a TV output. Social exchanges will be managed and aided by a “social interaction agent” that resides in the set-top box (for scalability and privacy) and that “looks” at all the interactions and commands from the user. Social interaction agents can go on the net and query other agents on behalf of user’s wishes or simply to fulfill the goal of improving the quality and breadth of user’s interactions. Interactions are cast as “services” that are managed and enhanced by EasyReach, for example: • organizing groups of people that already know each other, e.g. relatives and friends; • creating groups of people that care for a certain topic (discussion); • organizing groups for the purpose of “interfacing” the user with existing organizations, e.g. a church • organizing help sessions where a skilled user that can help or train other users.

Project duration: 28 months Web site:

Involved countries/national agencies: IT, GR, DE

Total project cost: € 2,9 million Grant € 1,5 million EC contribution € 0,58 million

AAL-2009-2-116

The main goal of the Elder-Spaces project is to introduce a radical shift on the way social networking is delivered to and used by the elderly, with a view to enabling senior adults to benefit from social networking especially in terms of their social activation, active living and overall quality of life. To this end, Εlder Spaces will design a novel ICT based social networking platform (beyond existing elderly networks) along with a range of applications that will be delivered over this platform. The key innovations to be introduced by the Elder Spaces social networking platform include: • The development of a semantic social network, based on an integration of web semantics data and techniques (i.e. ontologies, knowledge bases, data mining) to conventional Web2.0 platforms. This will enable a key customization of social networks to elderly requirements. • The delivery of social network functionality over novel ergonomic interfaces with proven acceptance by older adults (such as TV and interactive surfaces). These interfaces are also expected to lead to wide acceptance of social networking, given that the elderly will be able to enjoy the functionality based on their conventional comfortable access modalities. • The development of customized applications, addressing the needs, interests and preferences of the elderly. Elder Spaces aims at reinforcing and expediting recent trends according to which older adults are joining social networking in a rapid pace. Elder Spaces intends to become synonymous to ICT based social networking for the elderly much in the same way platforms such as facebook.com and myspace.com are synonymous for social networking for younger generations. The Elder-Spaces platform will be delivered as a set of extensions over the iWiW social network (iWiW.hu), which is operated by one consortium partner. The Elder-Spaces applications will be deployed over the extended iWiW network, but also over popular platforms such as Facebook.

Project duration: 30 months Web site:

Involved countries/national agencies: GR, HU, DE, IT

Total project cost: € 2,75 million Grant € 1,35 million EC contribution € 0,52 million

ExCITE

AAL-2009-2-125

The proposal for Enabling Social Interaction Through Embodiment (ExCITE) will examine social interaction between elderly in their homes and remotely located persons through robotic telepresence. The two main goals of the proposal are 1. to learn how to improve the quality of life for elderly living at home by enabling social connection through telepresence embodiment, and 2. to begin deployment of a commercial robotic telepresence product within 2-3 years of the study start. The ExCITE project will deploy initial units, gather and evaluate user feedback (both residents and caregivers), modify the prototype according to the feedback and then deploy/re-deploy improved units in a constant feedback process. The prototype called the “Giraffe”, is a mobile, human height physical avatar integrated with a videoconferencing system. It utilizes a general hardware that is specifically designed for rapid modification by allowing many modifications to be implemented in software. The methodology is focused around a strong user inclusion process, evaluating the concept based not upon the technology but on user feedback. The project will advance the state-of-the-art in robotic telepresence technology, but more importantly will focus on and advance the understanding of user requirements and issues for social interaction via telepresence embodiment. The project is founded upon deep understanding of elderly and associated healthcare trends and issues. The Giraffe concept and ExCITE proposal advocates to extend and enhance human presence by enabling social interaction between people separated by distance, thereby taking into account a new generation of global and mobile senior citizens.

Project duration: 36 months Web site: www.excite.org

Involved countries/national agencies: SE, IT, ES (ISCIII)

Total project cost: € 2,8 million Grant € 1,45 million EC contribution € 0,56 million

FamConnector

AAL-2009-2-126

The objective of FamConnector is to be Europe’s leading generic product in the field of meaningful, online inter-generational interactions between older adults (i.e. grandparents) and young children (i.e. their grandchildren, aged 3-9) and other geographically-distant family members. Through the unique integration of technology with content and activities to be developed on the basis of end-user feedback, FamConnector is designed to establish and nurture older adults’ connection to their grandchildren and loved ones, enriching their lives, engaging their minds and fostering meaningful relationships through new, content-rich experiences. Current communications tools offer only the means to send messages back and forth, but whether the exchange of information is written or oral, young children do not have the maturity or communication skills to engage in these types of interactions . They require content and activities, such as books, games and pictures, to provide the foundation for their interactions. The current state-of-the-art in communication is designed to support businesses or for the recreation of older children and adults, but neglects the requirements of young children, offering older adults without the means to reach out to them. FamConnector provides the solution. And, by focusing solely on intergenerational interactions, FamConnector will be able to provide the richest experience, offering a specifically-tailored, user-friendly platform with the most effective, relevant content so that each interaction creates a real, lasting impact in the lives of the elderly population we serve. In doing so, FamConnector can address a variety of needs such as connectivity, cognitive ability, inclusion, self-empowerment, identity, purpose and overall quality of life. As a white label scalable solution, FamConnector will empower other service providers for elderly people, enabling them to offer an added value solution and a new stream of revenue.

Project duration: 30 months Web site:

Involved countries/national agencies: IL, FI, AT, CH

Total project cost: € 1,5 million Grant € 1,04 million EC contribution € 0,3 million