Subproject Service Infrastructure and Usability Engineering

Within the Smart Senior project, five institutes of Technische Universität Berlin are cooperating with numerous research and industrial partners. The goal is the development of an integrated service platform and the creation of various exemplary services with common user interfaces suitable for elderly users. Health services, anomaly detection, personalized recommendations, telemedicine, usability evaluation and financial models are the central research topics within this project.

In the scope of the project, DAI-Labor has the goal to build an uniform and tailored network and service infrastructure with basic functions for general and specific communication tasks. The integration of various sensors and controllable devices supports an automatic recognition and reaction to dangerous situations within the household, e.g. to avoid serious incidents within the home. On this technological basis, various services are working in different areas like information, entertainment, health, prevention and vital data management. Besides automatic recommendations, which learn from their users, the application and evaluation of novel aspects of telemedical services is a major issue in the project. The continuous evaluation of the usability of the developed applications especially for elderly and physically limited users plays an important role.

To attain these goals, current research results and the latest state of the art techniques are applied within the project. Based on the service infrastructure, anomaly recognition systems process diverse sensory data and the recommendation system utilizes various semantic approaches to e.g. give recommendations for the TV program. User interfaces, tailored to the needs of the elderly users, are created in a unique look and feel and integrated in a common smart home system. The simulation of user interaction during the development process allows the optimization and evaluation of the created applications at design time. Specialized tools support the developers during these activities.

The developed systems are deployed and tested within the Ambient Assisted Living Testbed of DAI-Labor, where they are also available for the general public. In a large scale field test, the developed overall system will be deployed in numerous private apartments to gain new insights and evaluate the developed services.