Research Project SOPRANO

Service Oriented Programmable Smart Environments for Older Europeans

Services based on ICT technologies are already part of everyday life in Europe. However, the complexity and novelty of many new devices and services threaten many older people with exclusion from their use. At the same time, research has shown that a large segment of the growing number of older people in Europe can be offered “Ambient Assisted Living” services which radically improve their quality of life, provided usability of ICT systems can be equally radically improved. SOPRANO aims to design a system which assists older people to cope with everyday life in greater comfort and safety, with integrated delivery of high quality support and care, to help all Europeans continue to live independently and play a full role in society.

Approach

The SOPRANO technical architecture will enable pro-active assistance by interpreting information gathered by the system about a user's situation. Responses are to follow agreed rules and seamless access provided to external professionals. Safety and security is strongly enhanced with adherence to stringent reliability standards. Interaction with users by voice and TV helps meet special accessibility and usability needs. Services utilising SOPRANO capabilities are to be designed for older people, including those with age-related cognitive changes. To ensure that services fully meet user needs, developers will work with potential users of SOPRANO systems throughout the project lifecycle, from user requirements, through iterative prototyping, validation of concepts and functionality and usability tests to large-scale field trials involving users in their own homes.

Three strands of research and development are to be integrated:

• Stand alone assistive technology: products designed to compensate for motor, sensory and cognitive difficulties frequently experienced by older adults;
• Smart home technology: networking of ICT in the home environment, with the integration of appliances and devices to provide control of the entire living space;
• Telecare services: applications addressing care-related needs prevalent among older people, with ICT utilised to enable support from professionals and informal carers.

Expected results

SOPRANO project homepage

www.soprano-ip.org

Contact for this project

Dr. Dirk Balfanz

The SOPRANO project sets out to develop and provide highly innovative ambient assistance to a range of living situations. In doing so, the project will advance the state of the art across the field, including:

• Developing and integrating a full range of interfaces serving home users, which make innovative use of users' intact sensory modalities, whether visual or audio, including understanding of natural language; not only by incorporating telephones, TVs and other familiar devices but also through new channels capitalising on strong associative familiarity such as speaking avatars;
• Providing senses for the home environment to enable the home to support resident users and carers, exploring the potential of radar for unobtrusive monitoring where essential, new modes of RFID deployment suited to the home, new general purpose remote health diagnostics, full integration of leading-edge vital signs capture devices etc.
• Developing new smart software capable of interpreting user situations and composing appropriate actions, based on latest research on reasoning and semantic modelling, advancing emerging new standards for ontologies of the real world and their application to real and complex problems, building new semantic models of home environments, processes and events and pushing forward capabilities of meaningful interaction with users;
• Tailoring an appropriate architecture for technical integration of all sensory, interface, networking and control functions, ensuring interoperation of all devices with a high flexibility, and the ability to be implemented at affordable costs.

SOPRANO is funded by the European Commission within FP6, Information Society Technologies.

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