ENABLE - A view on user's needs

Abstract

The ENABLE project, which is partly funded by the European Commission, aims to assist elderly people to live well, independently and at ease. In this project a wrist unit with both integrated and external sensors, and with a radio frequency link to a mobile phone, will be developed. ENABLE will provide a number of services for elderly people, among them also a remote control service for the home environment. This paper briefly describes the project in general and then focuses on the initial user needs investigation which was carried out in early 2007 in six different European countries. The provisional findings are discussed and an outlook on the ongoing and future project work is given. A special focus of this paper is on the environmental control service. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.