AN OPEN, EXTENDABLE SERVICE PLATFORM
FOR THE ELDERLY
Ingo Zinnikus, Christian Husodo-Schulz, Patrick Kapahnke
German Research Center for AI, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, Saarbruecken, Germany
Darren Maugham
Durham County Council, Durham, U.K.
Keywords:
Accessibility issues and technology, Personalized web sites and services, Learning user profiles.
Abstract:
Addressing the needs of the elderly is a challenging but imperative task in most Western societies. There is
general consensus that the best way to improve this situation is the progressive introduction of technical aids
to allow users achieving a more independent life. However, senior citizens frequently have difficulties to make
use of the advances in our modern information society technology because it requires that they need to learn
from scratch how to use some sort of specific terminal. Elderly users demand specially designed interfaces
that are: simple, affordable, always ready, integrate easily in their living environment and offer a single access
point for all services. In order to cope with these difficulties, the VITAL project proposes a combination of
advanced information and communication technologies that uses a familiar device like the TV as the main
vehicle for the delivery of internet services to elderly users in home environments. In this paper, we describe
the platform architecture, as well as the web-based applications and their integration into the platform.
1 INTRODUCTION
Today’s internet is mostly an ever-growing collection
of rather static information making the interaction
rather predictable and thus simple. It has a potential
to allow a larger or lesser part of the society to inter-
act with it depending on the quality and complexity of
the man-machine interaction technology. As we move
along the timeline, the internet becomes dynamic and
therefore more unpredictable and demanding to use,
especially for the elderly. As we are approaching Web
3.0 and the Internet of Services, there is a risk that
the gap between technology and its usability increases
even more: the Digital Divide becomes a manifesta-
tion.
Given the considerable increase in the number of
elderly persons, elderly users will demand more and
better services and more important they will have the
necessary resources to force the attention of public
and private organisations to their needs thanks to their
increasing political (through their vote in elections)
and economical power. It is evident such a complex
problem cannot have a single ’magic’ solution. It will
be the combination of several individual efforts what
will make possible to address one of the most chal-
lenging topics of modern society. Some aspects that
could help improve the situation: anticipation (a sig-
nificant amount of assistance resources are wasted be-
cause users are not prepared in advance to face their
retired life), independent living (providing the users
with the means to solve their own problems is the
key for a significant optimisation of resources), inte-
gration into the mainstream society (special services
are always expensiveand inefficient, integratingassis-
tance schemes into the general activity of the society
instead of treating it as an isolated world will signifi-
cantly improve the situation), massive introduction of
advanced technologies (with the aim to optimize re-
sources and address new needs).
The European FP6 project VITAL attempts to ad-
dress the needs of the elderly. The objective of the
VITAL project is to develop a new services platform
with the aim to significantly increase the quality of
life of the average elderly user. The new platform de-
parts from traditional assistance schemes in the sense
that it is not only oriented to satisfying day to day sub-
sistence needs but it considers also other important
demands that have deserved little attention up to the
328
Zinnikus I., Husodo-Schulz C., Kapahnke P. and Maughan D..
AN OPEN, EXTENDABLE SERVICE PLATFORM FOR THE ELDERLY.
DOI: 10.5220/0003344203280333
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2011), pages 328-333
ISBN: 978-989-8425-51-5
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
moment, such as the need for: information, commu-
nication, entertainment, self-education, etc. It aims
at developing natural and adaptive multimodal inter-
faces for the domestic TV and mobile environments
that respond intelligently to speech and language, vi-
sion, gestures and other senses, interfaces able to cap-
ture user desires and deliver enriched audio-visual
content while causing minimal interference with the
user’s activity.
The project encourages and serves users that are
willing to achieve an active life inside or outside their
home environment. A necessary condition to make
those objectives possible and to introduce our seniors
into the world of the information technology is to pro-
vide solutions to the interfacing barrier and here it is
where VITAL comes into play. VITAL offers a per-
sonalised companion for the elderly materialised in a
distributed system, supported on static (TV) and mo-
bile front-ends, where each user will have an associ-
ated personalised agent able to interact with the user
and with agents from other users. Under the umbrella
of this personal assistant the users have access to a
complete catalogue of personalized services.
The remainder of the paper is structured as fol-
lows: in Section 2 we give an overview of the VI-
TAL platform architecture, providing multimodal in-
teraction for the VITAL services which are described
based on an example in Section 3. Section 4 discusses
related work and Section 5 concludes.
2 THE VITAL PLATFORM
Figure 1: VITAL platform overview.
The VITAL platform is devised as an open, extend-
able platform, for web-based services and applica-
tions on the TV and mobile phone, designed espe-
cially for the elderly, where services and applications
may be added or removed with minimum impact over
the rest of the system. Furthermore, the system may
dynamically alter system configuration using differ-
ent criteria. The modular design will also help to
minimize the risks associated to some of the unproven
or emerging technologies necessary for the most ad-
vanced features of the project.
The basic layout of the VITAL Services Platform
is depicted in Figure 1. Elderly users get access
to the system services using Fixed or Mobile Ter-
minals, connected to the VITAL Platform and Ser-
vices by means of the communications infrastructure
available at the user’s site. Internal and external Ser-
vice Providers provide applications which increase
the quality of life for the elderly.
The VITAL platform is based on several pillars
which are described in more detail in this paper:
Universal Control Hub (UCH) as a middleware
which separates the target devices and services
functionality from their user interfaces.
A speech and natural dialogue processing engine
which is capable to use natural language as an ad-
ditional means for communication with the user.
A TV-oriented implementation of the user in-
terface layer (User Interface Protocol Module,
UIPM) for the UCH.
A set of internet based applications for the elderly.
Mobile application infrastructure for out-of-home
usage.
2.1 Multi-modal GUI
Designing an advanced environment for the elderly
is a big challenge since elderly users require specially
designed interfaces that are: simple to use, affordable,
always ready, integrate easily in their living environ-
ment and offer a single access point for all services.
Most previous attempts to introduce aided services in
the elderly community have failed; a computer (in
its traditional fashion) is an element foreign to most
users’ environment that requires skill, modifies their
way of living and has been systematically refused by
the users. In that sense, one of the most important
decisions is the selection of an adequate user inter-
facing approach that is respectful with the above re-
quirements. Using a TV in conjunction with a remote
controller is currently the best solution to solve the
interfacing needs, as it is a familiar and recognised
interface and facilitates access to a wide range of in-
formation and communication services for these types
of users.
For the TV based VITAL platform, a simplified re-
mote control is used
1
. It allows navigating the appli-
1
http://www.weemote.com
AN OPEN, EXTENDABLE SERVICE PLATFORM FOR THE ELDERLY
329
cation with a small set of buttons which are assigned
in a uniform way across the different applications.
Furthermore, in order to ease the navigation even
more, multimodal interaction is supported. The Mul-
timodal Dialogue System (Schehl et al., 2008) al-
lows more intuitive control of the system by means
of speech and gestures and permits a natural dialogue
between man and machine. The user is able to issue
combined voice commands and gestures to modify
the performance of the 3D environment and to search
for information related to the objects or applications
in scene. The VITAL system consists of a number of
independent applications, each of which is controlled
by its unique set of gestures, voice commands and its
dialogue system.
2.2 URC Standards-based Middleware
The overall system architecture is based on two
standards: the ISO standard 24752 ’Universal
Remote Console’ (URC, see http://myurc.org and
http://www.i2home.org) and the CEA 2018 ’Task
Model Description’. The URC framework has been
developed to address the need for pluggable and per-
sonal user interfaces. The concept calls for a de-
coupling of the functionality of a device or service,
and its user interface (hence ’pluggable user inter-
face’). This relieves the developer from having to pro-
vide one user interface in a one-size-fits-all approach
which is not suitable, in particular for older users.
The URC technology allows for personal user inter-
faces that are tailored to a user’s controller, context
of uses, and their individual needs and preferences.
Pluggable user interfaces can use any user interface
technology, using any modality for input and output
(e.g. HTML, Web 2.0, Java, C#, VoiceXML, propri-
etary technologies, etc.). The technology allows for
hard-coded (’canned’) user interfaces (designed and
specified before runtime), and user interfaces that are
automatically generated and/or adapted at runtime.
Main part of the URC standard is a middleware,
the Universal Control Hub (see Figure 2), or UCH
that serves as ’user interface middleware’ between
on the one hand appliances and services (called ’Tar-
gets’) and on the other hand personal user inter-
faces implemented on some platform (called con-
trollers). The rendition of a Target’s user interface
is guided by ’Resources’ that the Universal Control
Hub (UCH) retrieves from Resource Servers on the
Internet. The URC standard implements an architec-
ture called pluggable user interfaces meaning that a
user interface can even dynamically – plug into the
UCH which can serve multiple user interfaces. Im-
portant is also that the interaction in this architecture
is bi-directional, that is, the user is possibly informed
as the targets change their state. The UCH acts as
the central component, connecting TV, remote control
and microphone with the platform components (user
profile etc.) and to services available in the Web.
2.3 UiTV
The UiTV is the main user-interface integration
framework for TV used in the VITAL project, devel-
oped by CTU
2
. UiTV is capable of rendering user in-
terfaces described in CTU-UIProtocol. Applications
based on CTU-UIProtocol are nested to the UiTV
user interface. The UIProtocol provides a server-
side API for writing event handlers in both .NET and
JScript (Microsoft variant of JavaScript). The API
provides simple access to sockets and enables easy
updates for user interfaces of connected clients.
3 VITAL APPLICATIONS
The VITAL Services are designed to address real
needs of the elderly population with the aim to im-
prove their quality of life, increase their cultural level,
fill in their leisure time, integrate the elderly popula-
tion into mainstream society and incorporate this sec-
tor of the population into the information technology
world. The applications highlight the social aspect of
the project objectives, especially those services which
involve two or even more users into an interaction.
The VITAL catalogue of services (see Figure 3)
includes the following facilities: communications, so-
cial interaction, entertainment, education and infor-
mation, involving full integration of services for el-
derly users and service providers, use of appropriate
terminals for each user profile (i.e. the TV or mobile),
use of natural language to communicate with the ma-
chine, strong emphasis on personalisation, carefully
designed interfaces and the use of existing infrastruc-
tures.
Based on the URC approach, it is possible to add
or remove applications / services from the system
without altering the basic system functionality. The
applications may run on themselves or may use the
support of the lower level services provided by the VI-
TAL Platform (i.e. information from the user profile,
location services, reminder service, etc). In addition,
the applications, through well-defined interfaces can
provide user information to the platform in order to
update the user profile.
2
Czech Technical University, www.cvut.cz/
WEBIST 2011 - 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
330
Figure 2: URC architecture overview.
In the project, a set of services were developed to
show the diversity of internet applications which can
be supported and integrated.
Video-conferencing.
Peer-to-peer gaming.
Audio books.
Edutainment.
Tourist Guide.
Broadcast news search and transcription.
Information service.
Personal Newspaper.
Using the example of the Personal Newspaper, we
will describe in detail its features and the technical
integration into the platform.
3.1 Personal Newspaper
Elderly people are often reluctant to use new media
because of technophobia. Since the VITAL system is
intended to be used by this population segment, we
decided to avoid the use of Web browsers, direct ac-
cess to search engines (instead, the information ser-
vice invokes a query on behalf of the user), and even
hide the fact that the user accesses the Internet at all.
The complexity of Web pages with different frames,
links and advertisement is hidden and only the content
related information is visible for the user. In order to
accomplish transparencyof the content for the elderly,
we encapsulated the knowledge about the Web site we
use into the project’s ontology. Instead of showing a
Web page, the concepts of the ontology are displayed.
Using this approach ’Web-surfing is substituted by
browsing through an ontology tree (Zinnikus et al.,
2004), thus improving web usability for digitally dis-
advantaged persons.
To implement the service, a sophisticated HTML
Extraction Toolkit to analyse Web pages and to ex-
tract information out of HTML Web pages has been
developed. For most of the topics users are inter-
ested in, we concentrate on a limited number of Web
pages that contain appropriate information, e.g. news
about sport events. Since the structure and code of
most Web pages changes over time, the toolkit must
not only be able to extract content from a static page
structure, but must also be flexible enough to handle
structural changes in the HTML code. The HTML
extraction toolkit allows adaptation to the changing
structure of Web pages using information extraction
rules. Rules are specified offline and executed at run-
time.
Technically, the extraction is accomplished with
the help of an HTML parser by applying tree match-
ing rules on the resulting DOM tree (Kilpelainen,
1992). Like an XML parser, the HTML parser gen-
erates a DOM tree representing the content of a doc-
ument. Extraction rules specify the path within a
DOM tree where the desired part of information is
to be found. This information may not only consist of
text normally displayed by a browser, but also contain
AN OPEN, EXTENDABLE SERVICE PLATFORM FOR THE ELDERLY
331
Figure 3: VITAL platform main menu.
links to other Web pages which contain further infor-
mation. These links are often generated dynamically
e.g. by Web portals or database front-ends. Since the
toolkit can also handle such generated links, our ap-
proach is not limited to statically defined Web pages.
After applying the rules, the extracted information
is evaluated by the service, which calculates an inter-
est level based on the user profile. This procedure is
repeated several times for a list of Web pages which
are considered important for the user’s request. The
overall result is a list of topics ordered according to
the user’s presumed interest.
Another important advantage of this general ap-
proach for content extraction based on the extraction
toolkit is that (provided that encoding problems can
be solved) the tool allows customizing the news ser-
vice to any other language. This was particularly
helpful in the context of VITAL, where an English
and a Spanish version had to be maintained in paral-
lel.
3.1.1 Platform Integration
The personal newspaper backend service is a REST-
ful web service which is encapsulated as UCH target
for the VITAL platform (see Figure 4). This proce-
dure opens up a huge number of new application ar-
eas and services in the WWW which could be added
to the VITAL platform. The VITAL platform is con-
ceived as an open, extendable platform which is not
limited to the applications described in this paper. It
should be possible – at least in principle – to add any
other available service to the platform without chang-
ing or modifying the service itself.
In order to do that, in a first step the functional-
ity of the service has to be analyzed. A service in the
WWW is generally accessed by calling a URL. In-
side a web page, there are additional URLs displayed
which give access to further resources (i.e. via hyper-
links). In the case of the Personal Newspaper stan-
Figure 4: Information and Personal newspaper service inte-
gration.
dalone service, several cases are present:
Links for categories/rubrics (e.g. Sport, World
News, etc.).
Links for scrolling to the previous or next cate-
gory/entry.
Links for scrolling an article which is longer than
the page size.
Adding the service to the UCH-based VITAL plat-
form first requires to specify the socket description
and implement a target adapter for the service accord-
ingly. The socket description must be specified in a
way such that all possible (or at least relevant) hyper-
links in the service can be addressed. E.g. there must
be a command which allows getting the different cat-
egories provided by the newspaper service. Further-
more, commands must be specified to scroll to previ-
ous/next entries and within an article.
Hyperlinks in RESTful services refer to resources
(Richardson and Ruby, 2007). Resources are in this
case the entries (articles) in the newspaper, includ-
ing headline and body of the article. When accessing
these hyperlinks, the service responds by sending the
resources to the requesting client.
A command in the UCH socket allows retrieving
an article identified by an URL. The socket hides the
actual URL address. Instead it introduces an array for
each category which contains the articles available for
each category. This encapsulation or view approach
is not strictly necessary, but defines access to the re-
sources in a more intuitive way. Dependencies be-
tween commands are used to ensure that a command
is invoked e.g. only if the user is already logged in.
Access to the service and thus to the resources is
provided by the implementation of the target adapter.
If a command on the socket is invoked, the target
adapter sends an HTTP request to the server on which
hosts the Personal Newspaper service. The target
WEBIST 2011 - 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
332
adapter e.g. gets a request from the UI part for the
first entry in the category Sport.
The target adapter then accesses the service by
sending an HTTP request to the service, containing
a URL. The URL identifies a resource (an article) on
the server. The service responds by sending the re-
source (a headline and a text) which is then converted
according to the format specified by the socket de-
scription and sent back to the UIPM component.
For the integration, the implementation of the Per-
sonal Newspaper backend service was not modified
except concerning the format of the response: the
stand-alone service accessed by a Web browser re-
sponds with HTML format, whereas the integrated
service sends back well-formed XML. This allows
parsing the response with standard XML parsers and
extracting the returned data with corresponding stan-
dard languages (e.g. by using XPath expressions
3
). If
a completely external service has to be integrated to
the platform, this step has to be extended by analyz-
ing the possible HTML responses and extracting the
relevant data with specialized tools.
Using this procedure, an arbitrary service can be
integrated and made available to the users of the VI-
TAL platform.
4 RELATED WORK
There are a number of middlewaretechnologies avail-
able today. Inside the home, there are various net-
working platforms for the interoperationof networked
devices and appliances. In consumer electronics,
there is an increasing trend for high-end devices to
be furnished with the ability for remote control via a
home network (Biggs, 2009). With standardised net-
working protocols, the use of general-purpose con-
trollers and intelligent user agents is possible. One
of the networking platforms used in this area is UPnP
(Universal Plug and Play).
Outside the home, service-oriented architectures
(SOA) as an architectural style for distributed sys-
tems, have been gaining momentum over the last few
years and are now considered as mainstream in en-
terprise computing. Compared to earlier middleware
products, SOAs put a stronger emphasis on loose
coupling between the participating entities in a dis-
tributed system. Web Services (Alonso et al., 2004)
are the technology that is most often used for imple-
menting SOAs. Web services are supported by a stack
of Internet standards (HTTP, XML, SOAP, WSDL,
and UDDI). Today, the frontend of service-oriented
3
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/
architectures to the private user is via Web browser
technologies. These DHTML user interfaces do usu-
ally not cater for a user’s individual needs and pref-
erences regarding user interaction and service provi-
sion.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we presented the VITAL project which
aims at improving the quality of life for the elderly.
We described the basic assumptions, the architecture
of the platform and the approach for an adaptive user
interface which allows for multimodal interactions.
The VITAL applications are specifically designed to
serve the purpose of increasing the level of social in-
teractions among the elderly participants.
Evaluations and tests were conducted at users’
sites in three circles so that applications could be ad-
justed to the testing experience. Two types of testing
are performed: testing with private home users and
testing in public sites such as: residences or day cen-
tres. The feedback proved that users have a consid-
erable interest especially in applications which allow
interaction and communication with others.
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