Active aging: a user centred approach for designing a virtual village network architecture

Currently many solutions for domotic housing have been created to provide a better autonomous life for older people and to reduce health and caregiving costs. Unfortunately, assistive technology is often not accepted by old users. This may be due to the technology-oriented approach adopted in designing such systems, which does not consider enough the users' needs. This paper proposes a procedure to design an AAL(Ambient Assisted Living) system to support active aging based on the User-Centred Design approach. A virtual network architecture integrating different solutions have been designed involving final users from the very beginning of the planning stage. The result is a high usable and flexible platform that allows creating user-friendly products as well as services and realizing also high-level functions by integrating data from completely different contexts.