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home appliances represent an important enabling factor for the design and
development of virtual elderly support community environments. In particular, a
platform based on mobile agents combined with federated information management
mechanisms provides a flexible infrastructure on top of which specialized care
services can be built. Nevertheless, the specific characteristics of the elderly
population, not very open to deal with new technologies, require a careful integration
of the infrastructure with traditional home appliances and TV sets. Furthermore, the
tuning and eventual acceptance of the technology can only be determined when
reliable prototypes are tested in field with real users. This field trial constitutes the
next phase in the TeleCARE project.
Acknowledgements.
This work was funded in part by the IST program of the
European Commission. The authors thank the contribution of the TeleCARE
consortium members (Uninova, University of Amsterdam, SKILL, RoundRose
Associates, Camera de Comercio de Navarra, and Synkronix).
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