From individual communication to social networks: Evolution of a technical platform for the elderly

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges we currently face is to keep elderly people immersed in their social environment when they leave their home and enter a retirement home. Many of them feel isolated. The TV stands as their favorite media, and our first experiments showed that listening to vocalized local news and receiving TV messages and photos from family helped in fighting these feelings of isolation. With online social networks, we wish to involve the elderly in new types of interactions, more various and frequent. They will be more active and included in micro-conversations around multimedia contents. The retirement homes will benefit also from social networking capabilities. They will participate to the local news dedicated to the elderly people. In addition, the remote family will be informed of activities through an agenda and various publications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.