Persona Short Video Transcription
The EU population is becoming increasingly older, particularly in the Mediterranean countries. It is expected that in 2020, around 20% of the population will be over 65 years old.
PERSONA aims at advancing the paradigm of Ambient Intelligence through the harmonization of Ambient Assisted Living technologies and concepts; these are geared to the development of sustainable and affordable solutions that allow elderly people to live longer in their preferred place: home, neighbourhood, town or further away.
STEFANO: The project involves19 organizations, research centres, companies, universities from 6 European countries and we will deal with some pilots in order to verify with real users in a real environments what we are developing.
We will have 3 pilots in order to have this verification in according to the several different social-economical culture situations that we can have in Europe, so we’ll have pilot in Italy, pilot in Spain and pilot in Denmark.
The final objective is to provide services to enable elderly users to live longer and more independently while increasing their quality of life.
SERGIO: Ambient Assisted Living are the intelligent technologies that will enhance dramatically the independent living of elderly people and people with disabilities
The PERSONA project has developed different services based on AAL; these can be classified in four different categories:
The first category is “Promotion of Social Integration”. The aim of these services is to alleviate loneliness and isolation among elderly people by providing ICT media, supporting the need of belonging & experience exchange, which help create friendships, social contact and opportunities for participating in community activities.
The second category is “Supporting Daily Activities”. These services aim at providing the elderly person with the means of overcoming those emergent difficulties with the use of a semi-automatic system that will complement their abilities to face the different types of daily activities (i.e. showering, cooking, remembering appointments, shopping, following medical prescriptions, etc). These are managed directly from the home complying with their responsibilities yet empower these people with their own self-determination.
The third category of needs covered by PERSONA Project is “Feeling Safe and Protected”. These services are aimed at creating a non-invasive environment in which the person feels safe and protected, by detecting in advance the occurrence of these types of situations, and providing ways to alert third parties when the risk has been detected and identified. It is also important that, in situations in which the risk is external, the person is guided and informed by the system about the risk and the implications of possible damages.
The fourth and last category is “Mobility”. These services face the fact that elderly people have problems when they leave their homes because they are not confident about what they can find outside and are afraid about how to manage risky situations.
One of the most relevant technical innovations of PERSONA is the platform that is used to run all these services. It is emphasised that the PERSONA platform is delivered as an open source.
JUAN PABLO: PERSONA has developed an open standard and interoperable framework in order to build a broad range of AAL Services over it. The final idea is to test in real life conditions how users are testing this type of applications and which is the impact that is generated on them and also in order to evaluate the business strategy in order to implement this system in real life market conditions.
The third pillar of PERSONA, apart from users’ needs and Ambient Intelligence technologies, is the transfer of solutions that PERSONA offers as commercial opportunities. The consortium is in contact with several public and private entities which are interested in the exploitation of our results. So, we combine technology development with business “strategy” to establish the link between technology, user needs and the market.
Sergio: We are working hard to make the Ambient Assisted Living becomes a reality and accessible for million of people in Europe in the next years
