AAL - Co-Living - Virtual Collaborative Social Living Community for Elderly

The main goal of the proposed project is the development of an ICT-based Virtual Collaborative Social Living Community for Elderly (Co-LIVING) people, aiming to stimulate and prolong their independent and active living in an outward environment through an advancement in elderly people social interaction, contributing thus positively to their wellbeing. Co-LIVING is based on an innovative Social Community network (SoCo-net), integrating different mobile wireless ICT based services addressing the elderly so cial interaction context categories of Care & Wellness, Guidance and Mobility monitoring. The solution will utilize and scale up the successfully developed FP6 mPower open source middleware platform (http://sourceforge.net/projects/free-mpower/) to be app licable to the elderly social community interaction field achieving thus the expected Co-LIVING time-to-market perspective of 2 to 3 years after the project end. Co-LIVING target group is the big group of healthy elderly or with light physical or psycholo gical health problems who are self-supporting, able to move around, and can still contribute actively . They find pleasure in getting help or stimulation to be active in an outward environment. The aim of choosing the specific target group is to prevent, or reduce the risk, that these people are spending most of their time at home as they get older for a variety of accumulated (physical, psychological, psycho-social and cultural) reasons. Two well selected use cases, where elderly people can live with the greatest possible independence and activity are considered in Co-LIVING: a Living Village and the (physical) neighborhood of their home environment in a local community. Two pilots, in the Netherlands and Norway, representing the two different use cases, will be carried out in which the Co-LIVING solution will be assessed and validated by considering its social, economical and psychological dimensions.