Elderly people New Media. Contradiction or Chance? Experiences from the ALICE project

The ALICE project (www.aal-europe.eu) coordinated by JOANNEUM RESEARCH aims at interconnecting elderly people with their families and friends. This will be done by typical social interaction services like in the Web 2.0 world but also with an additional video conferencing service. The technology to be used for that purpose is not a PC but a Set-Top-Box connected to the TV set. This equipment can be found in most home environments of elderly people. A survey was conducted and pilot experiments performed to learn more about the elderly people, their specific requirements on 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. Results from that survey are described in this paper.