The HEREiAM Tele-social-care Platform for Collaborative Management of Independent Living

Despite the population aging trend asks for an urgent reorganization of the assistance models, the adoption of ICT solutions for independent living has a limited diffusion. This can be due to the digital divide, hampering the access to such technologies by some elderly, and to the hyper-specialization of the available platforms, mainly conceived for health purposes and assuming a single service provider. The HEREiAM project challenges this approach, designing a system that includes leisure and home-monitoring applications in a fairly simple TV-based platform, where the collaboration between the different actors involved in the older adult care is coordinated. Preliminary results of the field testing in Italy after one-month operation indicate that the video-call service is the most used, but also the health-related services are regularly accessed for self-monitoring purposes.