Publikation
A Barrier-Free Platform to Help Elderly People to Help Themselves
Sven Schmeier; Norbert Reithinger
In: Constantine Stephanidis (Hrsg.). HCI (27). Human Computer Interaction International Conferences (HCII-14), 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, June 22-27, Heraklion, Greece, Pages 316-321, ISBN 978-3-319-07853-3, Springer, 6/2014.
Zusammenfassung
The proportion of elderly people in German society has been
increasing for decades. As a result Germany, and other industrial countries
as well, are currently facing large demographic changes in terms
of age structure and population size, changes that will only increase in
the future. Furthermore, especially in bigger cities, the traditional family
structures with more generations living together are disappearing.
Starting from these observations, the project Barrierefreie Cloud für Se-
nioren - WirlmKiez (translated: A barrier-free Cloud for Seniors - We in
our neighbourhood), funded by the German Ministry of Education and
Research, aims to develop a platform where elderly people can get in
touch with and help each other with everyday problems and issues. We
plan to realise a virtual neighbourly help especially for elderly people
who have no or very little social contact. Persons using the platform will
be able to either provide support to others ("I can help to hang curtains",
"I can help gardening", ...) or they can request for help ("I need to go
to hospital for 4 days, who can take care of my cat"). The app will run
on computers, smartphones, and tablets and will be very simple to use
and appropriate for seniors. Its main features are creating a proposal or
request by using natural language. Behind the scenes we will use shallow
information extraction (IE) to extract the core information. After this
we store the extracted information plus additional meta information like
time and location on a central server (cloud). In the final step a generated
request or proposal is offered to adequate users of the system, e.g.
people who live nearby and are able to help or need help and connecting
the persons in the end.