Access For All

The EMERGE project aims to support the activities of daily living of elderly people with an innovative monitoring system. With the use of ambient and unobtrusive sensors EMERGE plans to monitor activity, location and vital data of elderly people and detect deviations from typical behavior. The project engineers a prototype that treats emergencies with stepwise assistance. More specifically, the three steps involved are:
* To provide proactive assistance to the elderly people themselves and then integrate friends, family or caregivers, if necessary
* To contact the Emergency Medical Service (EMS), in case the emergency situation can not be resolved, and provide information about the medical situation of the affected person
* To resolve the situation through the involvement of EMS who provide medical care, telemedicine counseling or send a rescue team.

More information can be found on the project website.

The project will develop a personal, user-centered enabling system, with services, for use by an elderly person in or out of the home, to mitigate the effects of any disability and to increase quality of life: independence, autonomy, mobility, communications, care and safety. The system will be based on a distributed open platform, enabling other services to be added by third parties, by “plugging” into defined interfaces. The platform includes a mobile phone, enabling the user to get out and about, for visiting, shopping, recreation, etc, whilst maintaining contact for help and services.

The overall strategic objective of the project is to:
* improve the quality of life for an elderly person wanting to lead, or to continue to lead, an independent life;
* assist in carrying out daily activities;
* monitor health and activity, especially reduce the risk of having a fall or other trauma;
* improve access in emergency, for safely and security, especially in the case of a fall;
* facilitate social contacts;
* increase the length of time that the elderly person can stay at home before moving to an institution;
* improve the quality of life and costs for their carers, especially for friends or relatives that might not be living, or want to live, in the same house, but are anxious about leaving the elderly person by themselves;
* improve the standard of care provided by local social services, and the cost of providing that care;
* reduce the amount of time that the elderly person spends in hospital before they can be safely sent home;
* improve the quality of life for the elderly person recovering from treatment, or with a terminal illness, who wants to stay at home.

More information on the project website.

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.

The ASK-IT integrated project aims at establish Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in semantic web enabled services, to support and promote the mobility of Mobility Impaired people, enabling the provision of personalised, self-configurable, intuitive and context-related applications and services and facilitating knowledge and content organisation and processing.

More information can be found on the project website.

eABILITIES aims at developing a framework for current and future actions in research, education and technology transfer in the field of ICT accessibility in the home, vehicle and working environments in Europe. With this purpose, eABILITIES will enable, organise and promote the share of related knowledge, communication, facilities equipment and personnel resources.

In general, the objectives are to make an extensive and detailed map of current and possible future technological developments in ICT accessibility, to organise contacts and exchanges and to identify needs, breakthroughs and bottlenecks. This requires a focused effort into tracing research and development, transfer of technology, education and training based on cooperation between industry, academic and government institutions and research centres. The information will be spread to the appropriate target groups using the eABILITIES space for resource and knowledge sharing.

eABILITIES will become the platform where excellent, multidisciplinary organisations involved in eAccessibility in Europe, will collaborate to:
* Benchmark commercial products and research activities
* Propose Recommendations and Best Practices in User Experience for eAccessibility products
* Share research resources (personnel, equipment, facilities and expertise)
* Establish fora and workshops
* Disseminate the project results

eAbilities coordination action aims at developing a framework for sharing current and future actions in research, education and technology transfer in the field of ICT accessibility in the home, vehicle and working environments in Europe. With this purpose, eAbilities will enable, organise and promote the share of related knowledge, communication, facilities equipment and personnel resources.

The whole range of the key stakeholders in this field will be involved, namely Users; Social Research Centres; National Centres for Personal Autonomy and Assistive Technologies; Research Centres; Industrial Research Centres and SMEs.

More information you can find on the project website.