| Abstract: |
The ageing is a global phenomenon that in the last decades has led to a significant inversion of the ageing pyramid in the developed societies. This fact has been introducing deep changes in societies and leading to pay more and more attention to the seniors’ concerns and needs. This framework has led to the appearance of multiple gerontechnologies (technologies that will meet the expectations and needs of people who are ageing in their "natural environment"). Many of these technologies intend to increase the feeling of belonging to a community, enlarge the social networks and improve the well-being and literacy levels and television has an interest potential in this purpose. It had a great impact in societies and has been one of the main agents of socialisation, being an enhancer of information and talks about television subjects. In addition, and because the television is the nearest technology for elderly, it can be an important technology supporter, to serve this population segment through features such as distance helping, the support of services that promote social interaction on the collective viewing, the provision of medical information or, as is the goal of this proposal, the information dissemination on public services relating to society. Despite the important investments which the public administration has done in the dissemination of such services, it is mostly web-based, implying a "pulloriented" activity (from the user's perspective) unlike the "push-oriented" informative dynamic that most of the seniors are familiarised. Due to this fact elderly commonly are in a disadvantaged position, for not knowing how to access public services and assistances they can benefit from (e.g. medication discounts, medical appointments, etc.), thus, there is a high informational dependence on their caregivers? network. In that context, the target audience of this project is the Portuguese senior population and it consider their specific issues, needs and expectations in the use of public services, like the public social security and tax office, in order to develop an interactive television (iTV) platform which allows automatically the enrichment of television experience with the integration of contents about public and social services. For this platform, an interactive application (running in set-top boxes) will be designed, implemented and validated in order to enrich the television experience with personalised informative contents considering the user’s profile (age, geographic localisation, clinical condition, etc.). To exemplify the central idea of the project, imagine the scenario in which the incomes tax system changes (e.g. people over 66 years old become eligible for a discount by delivering a declaration). This information can be sent to seniors while they watch TV in the following way: a) on the TV content, in a graphical overlay, a warning appears stating that an informative content will shortly be presented; b) if the user does not cancel this content presentation, namely, if the user does not press a remote control key targeted to cancel the information content, it will appear replacing the television content for a few moments. This
functional dynamics have some similarities with the Radio Data System (RDS) but with differences: i) in the support (in this case the TV set) and ii) by presents itself as a context awareness service since the informative contents are adjusted to the user?s profile and information needs. It is also intended to implement a cross-media approach, which allows senior users (more experts than their relatives) to get additional and more detailed contents, in addition to the displayed information on the TV set, through other devices (e.g. a tablet). |