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

 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

. It allows navigating the appli-

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

. 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.

Czech Technical University, www.cvut.cz/

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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

). 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

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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