Ambient assisted living: elderly people's needs and how to face them

Abstract

This paper is about challenges of technological and media innovations concerning elderly's quality of life. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) aims at producing technological and media support to help elderly people to stay at their homes longer. There are many different projects on how to reach this goal, mostly with technological background. This paper tries to point out pedagogical and psychological positions in order to reflect innovations critically. This paper concentrates on creation, design, performance and effects of these innovations. The discussion about Ambient Assisted Living started when political entities couldn't ignore the fact of the demographic change any longer. The European Union, for example, started a program called AAL to support projects that produce innovative devices for old people. One regional project is about the medium IPTV that should inform, train und support elderly so that they can manage their daily lives. Information and interaction are the main aspects, which will be considered for IPTV. Facing this growing field of research there are many questions concerning the necessity and the problems of all projects. Some of them will be discussed here: (1) Which possibilities and barriers arise with technological and media inventions? (2) How does the target group, which consists of elderly people, influence design, performance and effects of technological innovations? In order to get answers to these questions we will take a look at the situation of elderly people, of technology and media and the interplay between them.