GUIDed: Assisted-Living Smart Platform and Social Communication for Older Adults

Abstract

The aging population, the increased incidence of chronic disease, the technological advances and the rapidly escalating health-care costs are driving healthcare from hospital and day care centres to home. The GUIDed AAL EU project focuses on the challenge of keeping older adults independent and functioning in their own homes for as long as possible, by facilitating important activities of daily living through ICT solutions. Through a modular and customizable smart home platform, backened system and Android application, assisted-living solutions and services are offered to facilitate seniors' daily lives in their own home and the community. The main target areas are smart home control, home safety enhancement, city navigation, nutrition and health improvement, and socialisation/communication. In this paper, we present three of the five GUIDed services and report on our findings from the evaluation of the High-Fidelity (Hi-Fi) paper prototypes for these services. The Hi-Fi prototypes were tested by older adults and their caregivers using focus groups in four European countries, namely Austria, Cyprus, Norway and Poland. The results showed that all of the users found the GUIDed system understandable and easy to use, which is an encouraging finding considering older participants' low technological literacy.