Elderly People – New Media… Contradiction of Chance? Experiences from the Alice Project

The ALICE project (www.aal-europe.eu) coordinated by Joanneum Research aims at connecting elderly people with their families and friends. This will be done by typical social interaction services using Web 2.0 but also with an additional video conferencing service. The technology to be used for that purpose is not a personal computer but a set-top box connected to a television set. This equipment can be found in the home environment of most elderly people. A survey was conducted and pilot experiments performed to learn more about the elderly people, their specific requirements of such applications and potential limitations when using the envisaged devices and their user interfaces. Potential clients of such experiments were asked at the beginning of the project about their communication habits and media usage. The results of that survey are described in this paper.