Virtual center for the elderly: Lessons learned

Abstract

We present the main methodological guidelines followed during the Virtual Center for Elderly People project. This is a pilot experience of a telehealthcare platform for the elderly, capable of providing personalized medical care through the use of ambient intelligence. The focus of the project was the personalization of the service and the real-time knowledge generation from a distributed architecture including a sensor layer and computational models. The applied methodology is based on design-for-all philosophy, which we consider a successful approach to optimize cost-effectiveness, when the personalization is a requirement. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.