Smart mobile devices, due to their ubiquitous nature and high level penetration in everyday life, can be a key component of an Ambient Assisted Living system to improve the quality of life of older people. This paper presents the development and evaluation of Senior App Suite, a system created for assisting seniors' personal independence and social inclusion. The system integrates mobile computing combined with web and service-oriented technologies to offer a mobile application suite that seniors can easily use to access services, spanning various application areas such as social networking, emergency detection and overall well-being. The research hypothesis is that using such services can be beneficial for decreasing social isolation. There is quantitative indication that this assumption is realistic backed up also by the qualitative analysis from the user's feedback derived during a pilot study (n = 22) suggesting that Senior App Suite can motivate people in new activities, maintain connection with social ties, give joy and self-confidence, and increase the frequency and quality of social interactions. Our contribution is a detailed methodology spanning the research, design, development, and evaluation of a solution that aims to improve the quality of life of seniors while addressing open issues identified in related initiatives. social bonding and cohesion and thus improving their well-being. In addition, by supporting the planning of family or informal care to seniors more efficiently, the demand for professional care and social services as well as the associated costs are decreased. A user-centered design approach was followed with the active participation of primary (i.e., seniors) and secondary (i.e., social network peers and caregivers) users who attended interview sessions and workshops. User trials were also performed to evaluate the proposed social networking services in actual use with positive results.AMCOSOP (Ambient Communication and Sense of Presence) is based on advanced information, communication and sensing technologies to offer a set of personalized services providing elderly a sense of presence of their family, friends, and health care personnel, and assuring that they are never left alone [22]. AMCOSOP combines a software platform for the management of communication services and user information flow as well as home terminal devices with large touchscreens and user friendly interfaces especially designed for the elderly [23]. Through the system and the information that is collected and displayed to the elderly opportunities are provided to decide when to initialize the social connections or to use a service provided by the system or third-parties. Web and mobile client applications have been developed to provide services to users such as displaying recent activities or context information of peers in the same social network.Go-myLife facilitates accessing of mainstream social networks through a tailor-made platform from which elderly people can invoke typical social networking functionality ...
