Project: Advanced Lifestyle Improvement system & new Communication Experience

Acronym	ALICE (Reference Number: aal-2009-2-091)
Duration	01/03/2010 - 01/03/2012
Project Topic	Elderly people have limited mobility and are often bound to their home, many times being geographically separated from their friends and family. They often lose connection to their beloved ones and friends, becoming socially isolated and lonely. This situation still bears an unsolved dilemma for Europe’s society. However, the key determinant of quality of life at any age is social engagement as impaired social engagement is linked with health problems including depression and suicide. The overall objective of ALICE is to support the quality of life, well-being, social interaction and connectivity of elderly people in their home environments. The challenge addressed within ALICE is to prepare these elder years to become acceptable, meaningful and socially enjoyable. ALICE will research, develop and integrate a set of ICT based services into the existing TV set, allowing elderly people to enjoy experiences of communication and social interaction based on ICT. By doing this, ALICE will lead the way for elder people to distantly share moments of enjoyment, laughter and fun in a similar way as they were together face-to-face. The objectives are summarized as follows: O1: To investigate current communication practices of elder people. O2: To simplify electronic communication based on novel and existing technology in fields like TV and video conferencing. O3: To optimise visual user interfaces and related input devices for use by elderly people O4: To develop, test and comprehensively evaluate pilot Web applications, focusing on social networking and “togetherness”. O5: To investigate business issues in order to guarantee also maximum commercial impact of the research results.
Website	visit project website
Network	AAL
Call	Call 2 – SOCIAL INTERACTION

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
	AT4 Wireless S.A.		Spain
	Ina Koning Verzoging BV		Netherlands
	JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH		Austria
	telecare GmbH		Austria
	Thuisconnect iTip b.v.		Netherlands
	Zydacron Austria GmbH		Austria