Access For All

This is a reminder for 1st International OASIS (www.oasis-project.eu) Conference that will take place on November 4-5, 2009 in Florence, Italy. It will provide a forum to present current and future work as well as to exchange ideas in the field of Independent Living and Autonomous Mobility for elderly.

OASIS is a Large Scale Integrating Project – partially funded by the European Commission (FP7-ICT 215754) – with the aim to develop an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic services, that will allow plug and play and cost-effective interconnection of existing and newly developed services in all domains required for the independent and autonomous living of older people and their enhanced Quality of Life.

Topics that will be addressed:
- How to support holistically the independent living and mobility of the elderly across Europe?
- How to connect services for the elderly in an one-stop-shop fashion and interrelate/ integrate them?
- What are the elderly and their families/carers primary needs, concerns and expectations from the technologies and services arising?

These, and much more, are to be presented in Florence, in the 1st International OASIS Conference.

Registration and full details are available at the OASIS website.

ACCESSIBLE (an EU FP7 project spanning over 36 months) will keep its survey online that aims at identifying the user needs of Developers, Accessibility Assessors, Elderly and Disabled People, Public Bodies, and Service Providers in the field of accessible software implementations.
If you are interested in contributing, these questionnaires (accessible via http://www.accessible-project.eu/index.php/questionnaire.html) are completely anonymous, and are available in German, Greek, Portuguese, Italian, English, and Bulgarian.

The main aim of the ACCESS 2 ALL coordination action is to encourage Public Transport operators belonging to the project target group to adopt innovative technological concepts and mobility schemes that enable high quality mobility and transportation services for all, as well as to provide their personnel with the necessary knowledge on the particularities of specific user groups, such as the elderly and disabled, ICT-illiterate, dyslexic and illiterate people, etc. ACCESS 2 ALL aims at defining concrete mobility schemes, guidelines and policy recommendations, ensuring accessibility of Public Transport to ALL users, through the coordination of current research efforts, the production of common research roadmaps, the identification of best practice models and the appropriate use of ICT aids and networks. The achievement of all above stated objectives will be measured and verified through well specified milestones and specific success assessment criteria.

More information on the project can be found on www.access-to-all.eu.

The ÆGIS project just released its first newsletter.

Accessibility is an urgent issue nowadays. Authorities and experts are putting a lot of effort on pushing forward accessibility of software applications but, despite this fact, ICT applications and systems are not fully accessible yet. The triggering idea behind ACCESSIBLE is to contribute for better accessibility for all citizens, to increase the use of standards, and to develop an assessment simulation environment (including a suite of accessibility analysing tools as well as developer-aid tools) to assess efficiently, easily and rapidly the accessibility and viability of software applications for all user groups.

ACCESSIBLE will exploit the technologies behind the recent expansion of accessibility tools and standardisation methodologies, in order to provide an integrated simulation assessment environment for supporting the production of accessible software applications mobile or not.

This will enable large organisations, SMEs or individuals (developers, designers, etc.) to produce software products of superior accessibility and quality, accompanied with appropriate measures and proposals for best practice. The proposed system will be demonstrated in the four pilots of ACCESSIBLE for the assessment of: a) Mobile applications (including JavaFX Scripts), b) Web applications, c) Web services (mainly focusing on infomobility services), and d) description languages (e.g. UML, SDL, etc.).

More information can be found on the project website.

OASIS is an Integrated Project with the scope to revolutionise the interoperability, quality, breadth and usability of services for all daily activities of older people.

More specifically, OASIS targets to utilise ICT and other key technologies in order to provide holistic services to older people to support their physical and psychological independence, stimulate their social or psychological engagement and foster their emotional well being.

In doing so, OASIS thus addresses key areas of their activities encompassing: independent living and socialising, autonomous mobility, and flexible work-ability.

OASIS introduces an innovative, Ontology-driven, Open Reference Architecture and Platform, which will enable and facilitate interoperability, seamless connectivity and sharing of content between different services and ontologies in all application domains relevant to applications for the elderly and beyond. The OASIS platform is open, modular, holistic, easy to use and standards abiding. It includes a set of novel tools for content/services connection and management, for user interfaces creation and adaptation and for service personalization and integration. Through this new Architecture, over 12 different types of services are connected with the OASIS Platform for the benefit of the elderly, covering user needs and wants in terms of Independent Living Applications (nutritional advisor, activity coach, brain and skills trainers, social communities platform, health monitoring and environmental control), Autonomous Mobility and Smart Workplaces Applications (elderly-friendly transport information services, elderly-friendly route guidance, personal mobility services and smart workplace applications). Applications are all integrated as a unified, dynamic service batch, managed by the OASIS Service Centre and supporting all types of mobile devices (tablet PC, PDA, smartphone, automotive device, ITV, infokiosk, …) and all types of environments (living labs, sheltered homes, private homes, two car demonstrators, public transport, DSRT, etc.). As user friendliness and acceptability is a top priority for the project, a user-centred design approach is followed along the service and application development. Tested iteratively and thoroughly by hundreds of end users, their caregivers and other stakeholders, the OASIS platform and applications will be optimized and submitted for standardization by the purpose-established OASIS world-wide Industrial Forum.

The resulting integrated systems and services will be tested in four sites Europe-wide (UK, Germany, Italy and a combined eastern site in Greece, Romania and Bulgaria). This will be the ultimate step to evaluate the overall success of the reference architecture and tools, as well as each individual application and to get the required data to optimize OASIS system and services within the project and beyond.

More information can be found on the project website.