Abstract: Technology can play a crucial role in increasing in elder people (and in their families and associated caring personnel) the feeling of confidence required for aging-in-place. The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) approach envisages the equipment of the elders’ houses with advanced sensor networks and interaction interfaces for the provision of services aimed at supporting the daily living, possibly based on the monitoring of environmental conditions and of inhabitants’ behaviour. AAL may offer some basic support to everyday activities (like reminders and guidance instructions), detect health critical situations, and may facilitate and strengthen the communication with loved ones. However, the success of AAL solutions greatly depends on an effective design. Even more than with ‘ordinary’ technologies, in fact, acceptance by users  determine the actual adoption of the technology: no matter how functional a technology is, the elderly will not use it, if they perceive it as intrusive, complex, embarrassing, revealing their limitations, or disrupting their home environment.
Involving elders into the process of designing AAL solutions means making them part of a complex research process that requires the building and nourishing of a long-lasting network of users and stakeholders for project support; this goes well beyond the current practices of sporadically resorting to care givers associations and/or end users to deal with specific project requirements (e.g., requirement elicitation, evaluation).
In this seminar we present and discuss a protocol for the design of advanced AAL services that distils insights gained in the course of the NETCARITY (FP6) project by a multidisciplinary team (interaction designers, social scientists and care givers). Our protocol is based on a concrete strategy for: motivating the participation of elders in the design team and establishing long-term relationship with the other elders and the ‘experts’; reducing the risk of drop-outs; securing the quality of the information obtained.

Contact information: Elena Not, Massimo Zanacaro, FBK-rst, Povo