RemoTable: Sharing Daily Activities and Moods Using Smart Furniture.

Social Interaction and the feeling of emotional closeness to beloved ones is mainly driven by the communication with each other. For patients suffering from a serious disease due to intense mood changes, it is difficult to keep regular contact with relatives. This affects the need for direct and verbal communication with relatives. To continue the participation in each others lives, we have developed a concept to share daily activities, current moods and presence information using a smart living room table. A first lab study with a prototype showed promising results with regard to expressiveness, joy of use, and usability.

Information and communication technologies for promoting and sustaining quality of life, health and self-sufficiency in ageing societies--outcomes of the Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing (GAL).

Many societies across the world are confronted with demographic changes, usually related to increased life expectancy and, often, relatively low birth rates. Information and communication technologies (ICT) may contribute to adequately support senior citizens in aging societies with respect to quality of life and quality and efficiency of health care processes. For investigating and for providing answers on whether new information and communication technologies can contribute to keeping, or even improving quality of life, health and self-sufficiency in ageing societies through new ways of living and new forms of care, the Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing (GAL) had been established as a five years research project, running from 2008 to 2013. Ambient-assisted living (AAL) technologies in personal and home environments were especially important. In this article we report on the GAL project, and present some of its major outcomes after five years of research. We report on major challenges and lessons learned in running and organizing such a large, inter- and multidisciplinary project and discuss GAL in the context of related research projects. With respect to research outcomes, we have, for example, learned new knowledge about multimodal and speech-based human-machine-interaction mechanisms for persons with functional restrictions, and identified new methods and developed new algorithms for identifying activities of daily life and detecting acute events, particularly falls. A total of 79 apartments of senior citizens had been equipped with specific "GAL technology", providing new insights into the use of sensor data for smart homes. Major challenges we had to face were to deal constructively with GAL's highly inter- and multidisciplinary aspects, with respect to research into GAL's application scenarios, shifting from theory and lab experimentation to field tests, and the complexity of organizing and, in our view, successfully managing such a large project. Overall it can be stated that, from our point of view, the GAL research network has been run successfully and has achieved its major research objectives. Since we now know much more on how and where to use AAL technologies for new environments of living and new forms of care, a future focus for research can now be outlined for systematically planned studies, scientifically exploring the benefits of AAL technologies for senior citizens, in particular with respect to quality of life and the quality and efficiency of health care.

The Lower Saxony research network design of environments for ageing: towards interdisciplinary research on information and communication technologies in ageing societies.

Worldwide, ageing societies are bringing challenges for independent living and healthcare. Health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare and sensor-enhanced health information systems offer new opportunities for care. In order to identify, implement and assess such new information and communication technologies (ICT) the 'Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing' (GAL) has been launched in 2008 as interdisciplinary research project. In this publication, we inform about the goals and structure of GAL, including first outcomes, as well as to discuss the potentials and possible barriers of such highly interdisciplinary research projects in the field of health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare. Although GAL's high interdisciplinarity at the beginning slowed down the speed of research progress, we can now work on problems, which can hardly be solved by one or few disciplines alone. Interdisciplinary research projects on ICT in ageing societies are needed and recommended.

Development of a multimodal reminder system for older persons in their residential home.

To live a self-determined life at home is uncontroversally a desire of many ageing people. Decreases in motor and mental capabilities, however, frequently make daily activities more difficult for them. Older people often forget tasks and appointments, and decreased mobility can limit their social interaction. In this study, we investigate the way in which technological support can assist in the organisation, structuring and remembering of daily activities. Aiming at assistance seamlessly integrated into a person's household, we carried out an initial user study to investigate the technology and the kind of desired assistance of such a personal household assistant system should offer. We designed a reminder system for appointments and activities that uses different sounds, light colours or vibration patterns to represent different categories of calendar events such as upcoming tasks and appointments. The evaluation results show a preference for solely acoustic presentations or an acoustic presentation in combination with visual and tactile output. In our future work, we will refine the ambient and interactive presentation and implement and evaluate this technology in residential homes.