Project: Assistants for Safe Mobility

Acronym	ASSAM (Reference Number: aal-2011-4-062)
Duration	01/06/2012 - 01/10/2015
Project Topic	The ASSAM project aims to compensate for declining physical and cognitive capabilities of elderly persons by modular mobility assistants for various platforms, such as walker, wheelchair, and tricycle, providing sustained everyday mobility and autonomy with seamless transition from indoors to outdoors in environments such as residential complexes or the neighbourhood quarter. All assistants feature an appropriate user interface module that allows elderly users to consult caregivers at call centres to ask for route descriptions to be shown on the device, or to request immediate medical aid on location in case of emergency. Using laser-range sensors, safety assistants help to recognize and avoid steps and obstacles. On the top level, autonomous helper assistants provide fully automatic navigation to chosen destinations and can even be remotely directed by the user to a parking position. In smart home environments that implement the URC standard, lights, doors, and elevators can be controlled by spoken language. The business model targets a broad market by retrofitting various mobility platforms from popular vendors, which comprises the production of affordable add-on components as well as maintenance services. Novel, affordable laser sensors will reduce the formerly prohibitive costs. Moreover, we see an emerging business model in the sharing, leasing, and renting of mobility assistants to end users, including maintenance and transport services. Indoors, autonomous navigation and environment control require customized solutions from SMEs that include home automation and mapping services. Outdoors, the annotation of maps with the accessibility of routes offers another field for navigation service providers. End users will be involved from the beginning of the project into the design and evaluation of the mobility assistants. The iterative schedule of the work packages implies two refinement phases, where the initial prototypes will be adapted to the user’s feed
Network	AAL
Call	Call 4 – Mobility

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
	Budelmann Elektronik GmbH		Germany
	Centre de vida independent		Spain
	Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz		Germany
	Ecobike S. L.		Spain
	HumanElektronik GmbH		Germany
	Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe e.V., Regionalverband Weser-Ems, Ortsverband Stedingen		Germany
	Lifante Vehicles, S. A.		Spain
	neusta mobile solutions GmbH		Germany
	Stichting Bartiméus Accessibility		Netherlands
	Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya		Spain
	Utrecht School of the Arts, Faculty of Art, Media & Technology (KMT)		Netherlands