Design and Development of a Telepresence and Monitoring Service to Empower the Older Adults

Older people would like to live independently for as long as possible. However, seniors may experience cognitive and physical problems which could have a great impact on their autonomy and their quality of life. Over the last years, several national and European projects were founded to design, develop, and test reliable solutions to support the life of the older population. In this context, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as robots, could represent a valid solution to empower older people. Inspired by the current trends, this paper presents the design and the development of a telepresence and monitoring service to foster active aging. The proposed approach is based on a human-centered design which leads to the definitions of the services through the focus groups and the survey conducted within social cooperatives. Based on these results, a cloud system composed of environmental sensors and a telepresence robot was developed and tested in private homes and residential facilities without the presence of any external support. The results underline a positive attitude of the senior citizens such as the caregivers involved in the services. The telepresence robot demonstrates high reliability and it was used for more than 100 calls during the experimenta- tion phase. During this experience, we collected and grouped multidisciplinary guidelines and feedbacks which we report in this paper as guidelines for future researchers.