A prospective design of a social assistive electronic system for the elderly

Abstract

Aging is a natural process that progressively introduces limitations in a person's life, which can have dramatic effects on the person's lifestyle and wellbeing and in most cases is related to the strength of the person's social bonds with the family and friends group. Therefore, it is important to maintain these bonds in the various stages of life, especially in the later life, when the individual has health limitations and may be living in a care centre. In this work, we developed an exploratory approach to the usage of ICT systems in order to autonomy assist the elderly in maintaining their social connections and relationships with family and friends. It doesn't substitutes the human care, but it should assist and encourage the elderly to preserve and develop their social activities and the relationships with their family and friends social group. We propose the design of a software system, capable of running in autonomous devices, such as, robots and other consumer appliances, enabling them to recognize and interact with the users, according to their state of mind and the specific current moment context. The interactions should be simple and focused on keeping the users engaged and informed about the current life events of their family and friends, and create the opportunities for the users to interact with the participants of those events by creating interaction proposals. On a technical level, the system should have knowledge about the user and be able to acquire and update context information from social media, video cameras, email, etc, regarding the user and the persons from his family and friends groups, in order to develop meaningful interactions with the user. An adaptive user interface would present and manage the interactions, acting as a mediator between the user and his family and friends group.