Design and development of mobile services platform for senior citizens

The aging of our society presents a range of challenges to housing providers. With the advanced mobile technologies we are now able to develop quality mobile services to help senior citizens' daily lives in dedicated smart living environments. This paper presents a systematic approach to design and develop mobile services which meet the needs of senior citizens. The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach was first adopted to translate quality requirements for mobile services to technical (design) requirements for design purpose. Two most important design requirements were identified in the QFD process and they are the need for emergency service and the need for good tele healthcare provider. An architecture then is proposed to incorporate the two most important design requirements. The concept of Wireless Information Device (WID) is integrated into the architecture to enhance service mobility, personalization and security. The pros and cons of the QFD approach as well as the architecture were discussed and future work is outlined at the end of the paper. This paper contributes to the design and development of high quality mobile services for senior citizens in smart living environments.