AAL in the wild - Lessons learned

Abstract

In the EU-funded ALADIN project the prototype of an ambient assistive lighting system was subjected to a three-month test in private households of older people. Despite intensive usability testing in the development phase, field trials pose special challenges including ethical issues such as obtaining informed consent and the need for guidelines for interviewing old people. Besides, real-life settings give rise to particular distortion effects which have to be taken into account in the analysis of the results. Although the findings indicate any overall slight increase in peoplés mental and physical fitness, they also suggest how the prototype can be improved in several respects. Above all it has been shown that packaging the technology with social support measures is essential to achieve higher user acceptance. Besides, the article discusses lessons learned related to the organization of user testing in real-life settings. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.