Utilizing living labs approach for the validation of services for the assisting living of elderly people

As the population continues to grow and in addition the percentage of elderly within the population increases, there is a need for supporting seniorities and people with disabilities with intelligent tools. All these provoke a high demand of set-up of new ICT technology and services in the daily living environment of elderly users for supporting their personal autonomy. T-Seniority is a new innovative service that expands the benefits of information society to older people through digital TV channels, and will run in even pilot sites in Europe. These trials can succeed through utilisation of the Living Labs concept, a complete innovation approach in which all stakeholders in a product, service or application participate in the development process. The concept is based on the Living Lab methodology which provides very high performance for product/service ideation and conception stages. In the current paper, the most important aspects of the T-Seniority project trials for expanding the benefits of information society to older people through digital TV channels are presented, in combination with the five-stage Living Labs trial configuration workflow.