The current society is dealing with a progressive ageing of the population. Life expectancy is constantly increasing and, at the same time, families tend to have less children than in the past. For these reasons, the global proportion of people aged 60 or over is expected to outnumber the younger age groups. This trend will have a serious impact on the society, since the health related costs will rise, there will be a lack of professional caregivers trained to assist the elderly and more and more people will suffer from chronic diseases that must be treated somehow. To overcome this situation, in the past years many initiatives aiming at increasing the elderly independence were born. The problemin developing technological systems for the elderly is that they are reluctant to try out newsystems and devices, so a great emphasismust be put on the design of an acceptable and usable solution. In this thesis, an ICT platform for independent living of older adults is presented. The platform is based on a standard TV and remote control, in order to lower the risk of technology refusal by older people, and aims at offering a rich set of services that include social networking, support, welfare and health. The health aspect is important but not the leading one, since such platformshould be first perceived as useful for different aspects of their daily life, and not strictly related to the concept the being oldmeans having health problems. Another aimof the proposed platformis to expand the offered services by involving external service providers, that will exploit the basic functionalities offered natively by the platform. The aspects related to the initial studies that let to the definition of system requirements and technical specifications will be presented, together with some preliminary usability results obtained from several user tests. Starting from mid 2016, the proposed platformwill be tested during three field trials in Italy, Belgiumand the Netherlands.
Conception, design and evaluation of an ICT platform for independent living and remote health monitoring
MACIS, SILVIA
2016-03-30
Abstract
The current society is dealing with a progressive ageing of the population. Life expectancy is constantly increasing and, at the same time, families tend to have less children than in the past. For these reasons, the global proportion of people aged 60 or over is expected to outnumber the younger age groups. This trend will have a serious impact on the society, since the health related costs will rise, there will be a lack of professional caregivers trained to assist the elderly and more and more people will suffer from chronic diseases that must be treated somehow. To overcome this situation, in the past years many initiatives aiming at increasing the elderly independence were born. The problemin developing technological systems for the elderly is that they are reluctant to try out newsystems and devices, so a great emphasismust be put on the design of an acceptable and usable solution. In this thesis, an ICT platform for independent living of older adults is presented. The platform is based on a standard TV and remote control, in order to lower the risk of technology refusal by older people, and aims at offering a rich set of services that include social networking, support, welfare and health. The health aspect is important but not the leading one, since such platformshould be first perceived as useful for different aspects of their daily life, and not strictly related to the concept the being oldmeans having health problems. Another aimof the proposed platformis to expand the offered services by involving external service providers, that will exploit the basic functionalities offered natively by the platform. The aspects related to the initial studies that let to the definition of system requirements and technical specifications will be presented, together with some preliminary usability results obtained from several user tests. Starting from mid 2016, the proposed platformwill be tested during three field trials in Italy, Belgiumand the Netherlands.
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