A TV-based ICT Platform for Active Ageing, Tele-care and Social

Networking

Silvia Macis

, Daniela Loi

, Danilo Pani

, Wil Rijnen

and Luigi Raffo

DIEE - Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Piazza d’Armi, Cagliari, Italy

Smart Homes, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Keywords:

Ambient Assisted Living, Service Platform, Personalized Interface.

Abstract:

The modern society is dealing with a progressive increase of the elderly population. The development of

services for social inclusion and independent living is of paramount importance to enable the elderly to live

in their homes autonomously as long as possible. Such a solution paves the way to a sustainable social and

economic model where older adults develop self-conﬁdence and promote their participation to the community

life. This paper presents the hardware/software framework of a novel ICT system for active ageing support,

which combines the potentialities of broadband internet services to the simplicity of TV use. User research in

three European countries allowed to deﬁne several important services (healthcare, home monitoring, shopping,

communication and social inclusion) to be provided through the developed platform. Its modularity, supported

by the App paradigm, enables easy customization and future developments.

1 INTRODUCTION

Population ageing is a widespread phenomenon all

over the world, resulting from the complex coex-

istence of many factors, such as the increased life

expectancy, the choice of working parents to have

less children than in the past, and reduced fertility

(ESHRE Capri Workshop Group, 2005). Accord-

ing to (United Nations and Social Affairs, 2013), the

global portion of older people, aged 60 years or over,

increased from 9.2% in 1990 to 11.7% in 2013 and

will continue to grow reaching 21.1% by 2050. Glob-

ally, the number of older people is expected to reach

more than two billions in 2050 (Fig. 1 shows the pro-

jected population pyramid.) This has major social and

economic consequences, since the healthcare expen-

diture increases along with the populations age be-

cause of the age-related diseases and disabilities.

The shortage of professional caregivers and the

lack of facilities in which the elderly could be trans-

ferred in are exacerbated by the increasing number

of older users (Rashidi and Mihailidis, 2013). Many

elderly who live by themselves suffer from isolation

for many reasons (Tomaka et al., 2006). With age,

many of them suffer from mobility impairments and

cannot leave their houses as often as they did before.

As time goes by, the sons move out, sometimes in

other countries, causing their parents to start living by

Figure 1: Expected 2050 population pyramid of the most

developed regions (United Nations and Social Affairs,

2013).

themselves, older family and friends pass away and

these facts lead to the shrinkage of their social net-

works. Also, there is often a lack of organization of

speciﬁc social events, their publicity is poor, or it is

difﬁcult to access this kind of information.

Information accessibility can be hampered by an-

other major issue that afﬂicts the elderly: digital di-

vide. Digital divide can be territorial, i.e. lack of

access to information and communication technol-

ogy (ICT) and lack of broadband Internet access, or

literacy-related, i.e. the inability to use certain de-

vices. It is extremely important to take into account

219

Macis S., Loi D., Pani D., Rijnen W. and Raffo L..

A TV-based ICT Platform for Active Ageing, Tele-care and Social Networking.

DOI: 10.5220/0005448802190227

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health (ICT4AgeingWell-

2015), pages 219-227

ISBN: 978-989-758-102-1

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

all these aspects to design and build a useful and user-

friendly assistive technology for active ageing.

During the past years, many projects with the aim

of helping older people to live in their homes au-

tonomously as long as possible have been funded.

Following this purpose, we have designed an inte-

grated platform that will offer the elderly a variety

of services to support them in managing various ac-

tivities, directly from their houses, using the TV as

medium. The use of TV can effectively reduce the

risk of refusal due to digital divide, because it is

present in almost every house since more than 50

years (Angius et al., 2008). TV is normally exploited

for entertainment and leisure activities and has a cen-

tral place in many elderly living rooms. Offering dif-

ferent kinds of social and support services, our plat-

form will reduce the feeling of isolation and loneli-

ness and help older adults to feel safe in their own

homes. In this paper, we present the rationale behind

the development of the proposed framework, from

the user proﬁling to the main services development.

Moreover, we describe the system in its present form

along with the facilities for future extensions, which

are natively supported by the developed framework.

This version of the system is ready for the experi-

mental trials that will be carried out throughout the

2015 in three European countries (Italy, The Nether-

lands and Belgium). This work is part of HEREiAM,

a project funded by the Ambient Assisted Living

Joint Programme (AAL JP, www.aal-europe.eu), call

5. AAL JP is a European funding activity that aims to

help older adults through the use of ICT.

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows. In the following section we will describe other

existing ICT platforms; in Sect. 3 we will brieﬂy de-

scribe the user research conducted to proﬁle our target

group and to select and deﬁne the services we wanted

to implement. The proposed platform architecture is

presented in Sect. 4, whereas conclusions and future

steps of the project are presented in Sect. 5.

2 RELATED WORKS

Creating ICT based solutions able to support older

adults in different aspects of their lives is, nowadays,

a critical challenge in our society. For this reason, the

European Union (EU) is funding several initiatives

(such as AAL, the European Innovation Partnership

on Active and Healthy Ageing and the eHealth Action

Plan) aimed at fostering the development of new ICT

services, applications and products in a wide range of

sectors, including healthcare, social policy, nutrition,

security, mobility and transport. In this section, we

will present some examples of research activities, re-

cently funded by the EU, which propose solutions for

the elderly following an approach similar to the one

presented in this paper. An example of integration

of technologies for health monitoring at home is pro-

vided by the four-year Dreaming project (Clemensen

and Rasmussen, 2011). It provides a user-friendly

technology, based on health monitoring, alarm han-

dling and a TV-based videoconferencing service, to

help the elderly and patients. This system provides

a valuable support to both satisfy the users need of

continuous care to safely and independently live in

their homes, instead of being in a care institution, and

to facilitate their social life and contacts with family,

friends and caregivers. Another project, Care@Home

(Fitrianie et al., 2013), additionally provides contin-

uous remote monitoring of emergencies and lifestyle

changes to manage or reduce risk factors associated

with independent living. The project aims at deﬁning

an open platform, exploiting the Smart TV as the key

front-end device. GeTVivid (Fuchsberger et al., 2012)

is another example of a TV-centric platform that aims

at stimulating and supporting daily activities at home

through a rich set of services. The project is based on

the Hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV) speci-

ﬁcation. The ELF@Home project (Carus et al., 2014)

proposes a self-care solution capable of generating a

personalized ﬁtness program based on the health sta-

tus and the continuous monitoring of activity level of

the users. The system will comprise several parts in-

cluding wearable activity and biomedical sensors, a

simple TV interface for ﬁtness sessions and a com-

puter vision system to analyse ﬁtness exercises exe-

cution.

Many other works are focusing on training games

that could motivate older adults to remain socially and

physically active. Long Lasting Memories (Bamidis

et al., 2011) is an innovative e-health service that

combines physical activity and cognitive exercises to

prevent mental decline in the elderly. Join-in (Bolos

et al., 2012) aims at counteracting loneliness in the el-

derly by providing a web-browser platform that con-

nects to PCs or TVs to offer multiplayer video gam-

ing, exergames and group exercising targeted at senior

citizens.

This article focuses on the potential of an innova-

tive TV-based system capable to offer a personalized

set of services and information. With respects to the

cited projects, the presented one aims at creating a

ﬂexible and open platform that simpliﬁes the integra-

tion of externally-provided services. This will lead

to the continuous expansion of the offered services,

increasingly addressing the changes in user needs.

Third parties can be part of the project ecosystem us-

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ing the platform as a powerful tool to provide existing

and new services directly to people that are familiar

and conﬁdent in using TV but difﬁcult to be reached

due to their limited computer literacy. The proposed

platform offers basic functionalities that third party’s

apps can use to promote their services. In fact, the

proposed platform is able to extend its functionali-

ties to health care facilities, home monitoring sys-

tems, educational and training video programs, shop-

ping as well as social inclusion opportunities. The

system compatibility with satellite technology guar-

antees full coverage in Europe, including rural areas

where broadband might be slow or unavailable.

3 EXPECTED USERS PROFILING

Identifying needs, desires and limitations of potential

elderly users is very helpful to create a valuable and

successful platform. In the ﬁrst phase of the project

the target group has been identiﬁed through both desk

and ﬁeld research. Besides literature, user sessions

have been organized in three different European coun-

tries (Italy, The Netherlands and Belgium). Based on

a proﬁling questionnaire, the background of the user

session participants has been investigated and char-

acterized with respect to demographics, social situa-

tion, general lifestyle and ICT use. During the user

sessions, older adults were invited and stimulated to

work and play with a variety of existing service plat-

forms. By applying observation techniques, think out

loud protocols and post questionnaires, the usability

of these different systems has been studied. After be-

ing sensitized, the participants were asked about their

willingness in adopting such a service platform, the

possible added value, the idea of having it on TV,

the request for services, and willingness-to-pay. All

participants gave their consent to the anonymous data

collection and exploitation, accepting the study pro-

tocol. Analysing the answers given in the user proﬁle

questionnaire, it was possible to characterize the tar-

get users in the three pilot countries.

The users tests with Dutch and Belgian older

adults were conducted in the Smart Homes demon-

stration house in The Netherlands (www.smart-

homes.nl). Thirteen seniors from The Netherlands

(average age of 71.24 ± 6.88, 8 male and 5 female)

and thirteen from Belgium (average age of 78.15 ±

4.26; 6 male and 7 female) were invited for the proﬁl-

ing.

As for the participants from The Netherlands, nine

of them had a college or university degree, i.e. the

group was relatively highly educated. About com-

puter usage, all participants use a computer (5 weekly,

7 on a daily basis), all but one use the Internet (1 less

than once a month, 4 weekly, and 6 daily). Eight out

of twelve participants never used a tablet. Ten of the

participants use a mobile phone and everybody watch

TV on a regular basis (10 daily, 2 weekly).

As for the Belgian elderly, ten of them had a col-

lege or university degree; again the group was rela-

tively highly educated. With respect to computer use,

the frequency of usage was lower than the participants

from the Netherlands (5 never, 1 more than once a

month, 4 daily, and 3 missing). Three participants

never used the Internet and one participant reported

to have used a tablet. Nine of the participants use a

mobile phone and nine reported that they watch TV

on a daily basis (4 missing).

In Italy, 29 expected users were recruited by con-

venience sampling from two local elderly associa-

tions. The group was composed of 14 males and 15

females, with average age of 70.1 ± 5.8. With respect

to school education, three of them had a university de-

gree, seventeen had an high school diploma and eight

of them had a primary school certiﬁcation (two miss-

ing). Figure 2 shows which technologies are mainly

used daily by the Italian participants. As we expected,

the majority watches TV whereas only half of them

use PC and internet every day. The percentages for PC

and internet are very similar, so it appears that most

computer users also use the Internet. On the contrary,

tablets are still a technology that the majority of el-

derly do not use.

Figure 2: User proﬁle questionnaire: analysis of the an-

swers related to the daily use of ICT technologies, from

Italian participants.

About how Italian participant spend their time

during the day to perform different leisure activities,

the results are shown in Table 1. Surprisingly, all

participants prefer to perform outdoor activities (e.g.

going out or physical activity), whereas they rarely

play any kind of game (computer or board games,

cards and puzzles). It emerges how participation in

the community activities, and the feeling to be part of

the community itself, is of paramount importance in

the daily life of the interviewed elderly.

From the observations and discussions during the

user sessions we can clearly conclude that the ma-

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Table 1: User proﬁle questionnaire: results related to the leisure activities.

How often do you perform the following activities? Never Every year Monthly Every week Daily

Go out (e.g., shopping, bus trip, restaurant) with sb 6.90% 10.34% 20.69% 17.24% 44.83%

Organize social gathering/meals 10.34% 37.93% 24.14% 20.69% 6.9%

Physical activity (e.g., walking, sports, gym) 17.24% 3.45% 6.90% 27.59% 44.83%

Play card games 67.86% 14.29% 7.14% 3.57% 7.14%

Go to cultural events (e.g., museums, concerts, ...) 14.81% 33.33% 11.11% 22.22% 0%

Travel 13.79% 65.52% 17.24% 0% 3.45%

Play board games 86.21% 10.34% 0% 3.45% 0%

Craft work 17.24% 17.24% 13.79% 13.79% 37.93%

Play brain-teasers/puzzles 68.97% 6.9% 0% 13.79% 10.34%

Play computer games 72.41% 0% 3.45% 6.9% 17.24%

jority was enthusiastic about the possibilities offered

by ICT-based service platforms. Nevertheless, differ-

ences between the platforms are reported and some

difﬁculties emerged: mismatches in color and icon

use, cumbersome remote control interaction, and in-

consistencies in third party modules with regards to

design and interaction. Flexibility in the offer of ser-

vices is seen as beneﬁcial. People have different kind

of interests, and also different ICT skills. Some users

will prefer a wide variety of services, whilst others

will choose for a basic system with limited function-

alities. Many of them are solely interested in being

socially active and look for neighborhood activities,

while others are interested in shopping services and

the exchange of recipes and photos. Although people

do not believe in such a service platform just for care,

they do see the added value it can offer to manage

their life in times of health deterioration. The con-

cept of offering services via a TV platform is seen

as a strong point. In particular, the large size of the

screen and the social character are main beneﬁts. The

TV does not have a care-related or stigmatizing con-

notation, but can be seen as a gadget for comfort, joy

and social connectedness. Since the TV has a promi-

nent place in the living environment, it is also an ideal

medium for reminders. The outcomes of the user

needs analysis have been translated into service de-

scriptions, requirements and technical speciﬁcations,

in order to meet user needs, preferences and expecta-

tions.

4 PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE

Since the TV is the most known and used device by

the majority of the elderly, as conﬁrmed by the an-

swers given in the user questionnaires (described in

Sect. 3), we decided to develop a system based on

it. Furthermore, we chose to create a platform based

on the Android operating system, in order to facilitate

third parties to enter our platform and offer their ser-

vices, being able to seamlessly customize the system

to the different regional uses and needs. A simpli-

ﬁed scheme of the platform architecture is depicted in

Fig. 3.

Figure 3: Platform architecture.

The Home Level is the part of our system that in-

cludes all the components of our platform installed in

the users’ homes. It includes all the hardware and

software tools operating at home, that will be de-

scribed more in detail in Sect. 4.1 and 4.2. Each

home is equipped with a custom Set-top-Box (STB)

with the system software installed on it, including the

main application, which comprises a set of basic ap-

plications that are stored in a local repository. Some

of these core applications, that will be described in

Sect. 4.2.2, work in conjunction with external devices

(e.g. telemonitoring devices, sensors and so on) ex-

ploiting a Bluetooth or Zigbee interface, according to

the selected application.

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The Platform Level is the server side of our plat-

form. It includes information regarding user proﬁles,

it contains an external repository of additional ap-

plications offered by third parties and a module that

manages the users authentication system. In addi-

tion, the Platform Level hosts a Documental Repos-

itory Service (REPO) that allows the storage of data

generated by each application in eXtensible Markup

Language (XML) document format.

The Third Party Level includes all external stake-

holders that may join the HEREiAM platform, which

can be divided in two groups: the ones that already

have their own Android application and all the oth-

ers. Both the Home Level and the Third Party Level

communicate with the Platform Level through a re-

quest/response mechanism. Third Parties cannot con-

tact the users directly, and each communication needs

to be registered and approved by the Platform Level.

In the following paragraphs, the main components

of the system are described in terms of hardware com-

ponents, software and services provided.

4.1 Hardware

As shown in Fig. 4, the hardware components of the

platform are:

• Android custom STB,

• Personal smart card,

• TV with HDMI.

• custom remote control,

• satellite dish,

• external devices.

The Android custom STB is the core of the sys-

tem. It is composed of a commercial Android TV

Box, with the platform software installed, and a se-

ries of peripheral connected to its USB ports, like

the remote control receiver, the smart card reader and

others. It has many useful characteristics, like inte-

grated webcam, microSD card reader, Ethernet port,

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It can be equipped with the lat-

est available version of Android operating system and

connected to the TV HDMI port. The users automati-

cally log in into the system by inserting their personal

smart card into the reader, without having to manually

enter their credentials. The TV is the mean through

which the system is displayed and the custom remote

control is the only device needed to interact both with

the regular TV channels and the custom STB. The re-

mote control will be user-friendly, provided only with

the buttons effectively used (i.e arrow keys, numbers,

colored buttons, back and home button, ON/OFF, OK

Figure 4: Hardware components of the platform.

and TV source). Since the system relies on an inter-

net access to properly operate, the users who live in

rural areas or that are not served by a broadband con-

nection, will be equipped with a satellite dish to bring

high-speed internet access via satellite. This particu-

lar service is available through the Project consortium

and it is of paramount importance for the widespread

diffusion of this support. Through the use of some

speciﬁc services, it is possible to link the system with

external devices (telemonitoring devices, home sen-

sors, etc.). For example, it will be possible to measure

some physiological parameters through commercial

Bluetooth medical devices, visualize them automat-

ically on the TV screen and receive feedback on them

from the remote care staff. Some previous works pi-

oneered the exploitation of the TV systems for this

kind of application, exploiting the DVB-T STB rather

than a general purpose one (Angius et al., 2011). Our

system will include options to monitor and evaluate

the users’ lifestyles in order to predict safety prob-

lems (Khan and Sohn, 2012), similarly to commer-

cial tools as BeClose (http://beclose.com/), CarePre-

dict (http://carepredict.com/) and others, paying at-

tention to the privacy issues reported by several el-

derly, completely reluctant to accept any video mon-

itoring device at home. For this purpose, the system

is able to collect data from home sensors: from their

analysis it will be possible to send warnings either to

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the users or to their caregivers. Typical alerts could

be generated for reduced or altered mobility (Scanaill

et al., 2006) or health-related habits.

4.2 Software

The platform is based on the Android operating sys-

tem. The home software installed in the STB is writ-

ten in Java and consists mainly of an Android cus-

tom launcher, an Android service running in back-

ground that handles various events that will be de-

scribed hereafter, and the system applications out-

and-out. The Android launcher, whose interface is

shown in Fig. 5 and described in Sect. 4.2.1, rep-

resents the HEREiAM main screen and provides an

overview of the installed apps. The custom launcher

is programmed in order to display only the project-

approved apps and hide all the other Android system

ones. This homepage is the medium that is used by

the subject to interact with the platform, in order to

select the services, see the alerts and be informed if

new events/messages are present. The users will have

a customized homepage, that will display only the ap-

plications installed in their local repository, according

to their proﬁle stored in the servers. The Android ser-

vice that runs in background will constantly check for

updates, new events and messages to be delivered to

the user. It is the mean used to exchange information

between the Home Level and the Platform Level. The

system apps share the same layout and the same nav-

igation scheme between each other, to help the user

avoiding confusion passing from one screen to an-

other. A more detailed description of the system apps

is given in Sect. 4.2.2.

4.2.1 User Interface

Nowadays, the proliferation of a new generation of

hybrid end-devices (Smart TVs) and set-top-boxes is

changing the TV consumption modes, combining the

traditional broadcasting reception with the Internet-

based transmission of attractive contents and services.

Smart TV applications can give viewers access to

large amounts of on-demand interactive services, pro-

viding a more engaging television experience. Unfor-

tunately, some of them are not designed for elderly

users that are novices regarding modern technological

devices. Viewing Smart TV applications is very much

like viewing web-pages using a browser on an ordi-

nary PC, therefore it can be confusing and not really

appealing for those older adults who have low com-

puter literacy and limited web-browsing experience.

Moreover, some of these applications are text-focused

(such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube) so they re-

quire a keyboard or a touch-screen to be operated. For

these reasons, within the project a comprehensive and

attractive user interface (UI) has been created. This

will ensure full participation and high user accep-

tance, overcoming the refuse of technological devices

due to digital divide affecting the largest part of the

elderly. The user interface is speciﬁcally designed for

elderly and controllable with the remote control only.

Besides general design guidelines (Nielsen, 1994), UI

development has taken into account 10-foot user in-

terface design principles.

The homepage layout, shown in Fig. 5, is com-

posed of a white title bar at the top of the screen, a

dedicated box for widgets below the title bar and a

left/right scrolling grid of apps at the bottom of the

screen.

Figure 5: System home screen.

On the title bar, the current date, project logo and

current time are always shown. The widgets below

the title bar are conﬁgurable according to the user

preferences. In the example shown in Fig. 5, weather

forecast and notiﬁcations about new events and mes-

sages are present. Using the left/right arrow keys on

the remote control, users can move the scrolling grid

of apps to select the one they want to open. The selec-

tion frame always stays in the middle of the scrolling

grid, while the icons move. To open the selected ap-

plication, users have to press the OK button on the

remote control. At any time, users are able to switch

back to regular TV channels pressing the TV button

on the remote control.

4.2.2 Services Included

The services provided by the platform can be grouped

in the following four broad categories:

Medical Care. The elderly, particularly those suf-

fering from chronic diseases, beneﬁt from being in-

volved with the management of their own health con-

ditions. The mere fact of self-monitoring their physio-

logical parameters gives them some degree of respon-

sibility for their own care and improves their stan-

dard of living. Users will be able to self-monitor their

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health status and feel more involved in their care pro-

cess through the use of a health application.

• Health App - The Health App allows users to

measure some physiological parameters - namely

blood pressure, pulse rate, body weight and blood

glucose level - using a set of medical devices in-

stalled at home and connected via Bluetooth to

the Android STB. It also allows users to upload

the collected data to a server, by simply pressing

a button on the remote control, and make them

available to a doctor (speciﬁed during the regis-

tration phase) for analysis. Health professionals

can access data using a dedicated web page and

can provide feedback based on their evaluation,

including comments or advices that are stored in

the platform database and displayed to the users

at their next log-in.

Community Participation. The proposed platform

will promote quality of life improvements for older

adults, also limiting the feeling of isolation and lone-

liness by offering socialization opportunities and in-

formal help through a community network. Interac-

tions with family members, grandchildren, neighbors

and friends are a vital component to the mental and

emotional wellness of a senior. Many older people

are no longer independent enough to participate in or-

ganized outdoor activities and need opportunities for

social interactions, recreations and leisure activities

at home. For this reason, the platform offers a set

of social applications that will help the elderly and

their caregivers to enjoy the feeling of being part of

the community:

• Video-Calling: the Video-Call App offers great

opportunities for social connection. It helps users

to stay in touch with family members, relatives,

friends and peers, increasing the sense of being

together in a shared space at the same time.

• Help Each Other: the Help Each Other App is

a dedicated platform for matching offers and re-

quests. This application lets users offer or accept

help from other community members such as vol-

unteers, shopkeepers, caregivers, friends, neigh-

bors and elderly associations. The scope of this

service is to enhance users’ independence, con-

necting people who want a service with people

who are offering that speciﬁc service;

• Social News and Events: this application keeps

the users updated on what is happening in the

community and participate more in the activi-

ties or social events organized by local authorities

(Municipality, Elderly associations, Clubs, etc.);

• Messages: the Message App allows the users to

receive notiﬁcations on different topics, both from

the platform basic apps (e.g. “request accepted”

from another user of the Help Each Other App)

and form third parties apps.

Security. For the elderly who live alone, getting help

in an emergency situation can be a concern. Thanks

to a network of wireless motion sensors installed at

home (for example in the bathroom, in the kitchen or

in the bedroom) and connected to the Android STB,

the proposed platform will give users the conﬁdence

to live peacefully in their own homes and will ensure

their safety.

• Alarm App: in case of absence of movement

in the house within a predeﬁned time slot, the

Alarm App will automatically launch an emer-

gency video-call on the user’s TV and if no one

answers, it will warn reference persons to check

the status of user.

Support. To facilitate independent living, support

daily life activities and promote memory training, the

platform offers two additional services to the elderly:

• Agenda: the Agenda App allows users to sched-

ule personal appointments (such as a doctor’s ap-

pointment with date, time and location of the

meeting) and reminders about daily or weekly

chores such as taking medicine, paying bills, pre-

scription reﬁlls or one-time events, directly from

their homes;

• Shopping: being able to do the shopping is an im-

portant part of living independently. It is also a

chance for elders to get out and meet other peo-

ple. However, as people age, some uncontrollable

events may prevent them from being able to do the

shopping or hamper it, such as bad weather con-

ditions, a short-term disability/illness, trafﬁc con-

gestion or strikes. The Shopping App lets users

order on-line grocery items at local stores.

The modularity of the developed open platform,

enabling the enrichment of the app set, will allow in

the next future the integration of further services be-

yond the ones described above.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, the hardware and software framework of

a novel ICT system for active ageing support is pre-

sented. The system, developed in the main path of an

AAL Joint Programme ﬁnanced project, tries to com-

bine the potentialities offered by the broadband inter-

net services to the simplicity of use of a TV set. Tak-

ing into account the reduced computer literacy of a

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large part of the older population, especially in the ru-

ral areas, as emerged from the reported proﬁling stud-

ies, such a solution represents a valuable candidate

to solve the digital divide problem. The rich set of

developed applications, embedded in a common sim-

ple interface, aims to provide active ageing services

to support the elderly in executing their daily activ-

ities independently from their homes, improving so-

cial inclusion and self-conﬁdence. The selection of

the App paradigm, supported by the Android operat-

ing system, enables the easy customization of the sys-

tem to support both local speciﬁcities and individual

customizations.

The main difﬁculties in the development of such

systems are related to interoperability. As a mat-

ter of fact, supporting different medical devices (for

the Health App), for instance, requires a considerable

effort, especially if a support for old Bluetooth de-

vices is sought. For this reason, the software frame-

work natively supports a modular app paradigm en-

abling a smooth integration of third parties software

to extend the basic system functionalities. During

the next stages of the project, an evaluation study

will be carried out through a combination of heuristic

evaluation (expert review) and user testing (cognitive

walkthroughs and observation). Later on, the system

will be installed in a “demo room”, in which the el-

derly could begin familiarizing with it. In the last six

months of 2015 three pilot tests with 75 older people

in total will take place in The Netherlands, Belgium

and Italy, that will focus on usage/acceptance, quality

of life and dependency.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is part of HEREiAM, a project ﬁnanced

by the AAL Joint Programme (AAL-2012-5). The

authors would like to thank the Municipality of

Cagliari, the Elderly Associations who participated

in the tests and the other partners of the project.

The authors would also like to thank the funding au-

thorities AAL Joint Programme, MIUR (Ministero

dell’Istruzione, dell’Universit

a e della Ricerca), UE-

FISCDI (Unitatea Executiva Pentru Finantarea In-

vatamantului Superior, a CercetariiI Dezvoltarii Si In-

ovarii), IWT (Agentschap voor Innovatie door Weten-

schap en Technologie) and ZonMw (The Netherlands

Organization for Health Research & Development).

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