Stay in Touch: Multimedia Delivery for Elderly People

The world has seen an increasing number of elderly people living alone with some mental and emotional complications as the ageing population increases worldwide. The elderly people have a greater risk for loneliness, depression, and decreased mobility than any other age group. A proper health and social care environment is needed for them to become more accustomed to living alone. Partially due to retirement and physical limitation, most of them become less involved with other people and have less mobility away from their homes. Spending most of their time at homes and watching televisions is unavoidable. There are increasingly fewer family members who live with elderly people full-time. Contacting to relatives and old friends becomes more difficult, and so does using phones and computers even though they are readily available. We propose a simple but effective system to deliver multimedia to the elderly people in order to help them stay in touch with family members, relatives and friends, and consequently lessen the aforementioned problems. The multimedia's contents are sent via the Internet from family members' and friends' devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs to the elderly people's television sets. It is intended to improve the mental disposition of the ageing population and to give them a sense of social belonging and active societal engagement, hopefully resulting in a better quality of life.