Perceived usefulness of assistive technologies and electronic services for ambient assisted living

This paper reports on a study analyzing the attitudes of users towards different types of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services. The study explores the acceptance and terms of use of large interactive screens for the most common applications types: health, social and convenience services. In order to understand the impact of user diversity, we explored age, gender, health status, social contact, interest in technology, and the reported ease of use as well as their relation to acceptance. Using the questionnaire method, 30 women and 30 men between 17-95 years were examined. The results show that users are not yet very familiar with the vision of smart technology at home and report a considerable diffidence and aloofness towards using such technologies. Persons with many social contacts and a high interest in technology show the highest acceptance for electronic services at home. Astonishingly, the results for the different applications were insensitive to gender and age, which indicates that the precautious attitude towards AAL applications represents a universal phenomenon. Consequently, acceptance criteria as well as users' needs and wants should be seriously considered in order to successfully design smart home technologies.