9 April 2010
The Milestone of settling on a final design and specifications for the 2nd prototype has been reached. This marks the beginning of the home strech of the project. Implementation and integration are well on their way to be evaluated during the second user field trials.
07 Jannuary 2010
The public deliverables due for Month 24 are finalised now. The results of the user studies of the first integrated protoype are documented in Deliverable D.7.2. Furthermore the Dissemination Package has been updated in Deliverable D.9.2b. It now includes the new Project Brochure. Finally, the Peridoic Dissemination Report D.9.3b includes all dissimination activities of 2009 and planned activities of 2010.
14 December 2009
Today the first user trials to evaluate the first integrated prototype of HERMES completed in Austria and in Spain. The trials focused on user acceptance studies of the system in general and on usability issues of MyFuture, MyPast and HERMES Mobile applications. The data collected during the trials will be analysed in the following weeks and published in Deliverable D.7.2.
10 November 2009
Consortium members of the HERMES project organized the workshop "Designing Ambient Interactions for older users", or DAI'09, at AmI 2009 in Salzburg. The workshop focuses on the various interaction methods, technologies and paradigms that are useful to support the interaction of older people with ambient technology. This workshop aims to support researchers and practitioners to develop proper interaction paradigms effectively and interactively in order to fit well with the older person’s needs and habits.
More information can be found on the DAI'09 Workshop homepage.
4 July 2009
The integration efforts in the first half of the project have led to the first integrated prototype being finalized and deployed locally at the Spanish trial site in San Sebastian. As a next step it will also be deployed at the Austrian trial site in Vienna. Consecutively, Spanish and Austrian older users will participate in the first field trial in order to evaluatethe functionality and usability of the developed solutoins.
25 November 2008
The project consortium is organizing a networking session with the title "Effectuating User Needs in ICT-Development to Support Ageing and Independent Living". This session addresses cost-effective methods for user needs analysis, involvement and evaluation. Addressing both the group and the individual with R&D efforts and development of innovative technology is a huge challenge for the research community. In this workshop we want to address the needs from the end-user perspective themselves as well as industry perspectives on the challenges with the aging community and the effective investigation of user needs and evaluation with end-users and through virtualization. The ICT Event in Lyon is Europe's biggest research event for information and communication technologies with around 4,000 participants (ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/ict/2008).
More information can be found on the session website (ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/item-display.cfm).
The HERMES partners CURE and INGEMA have organized a workshop on "Capturing Ambient Assisted Living Needs" in conjunction with the Ambient Intelligence 2008 conference (www.ami-08.org). After the successful completion of the user requirements phase in the project, the goal of this workshop was to share results and methodological findings with other researchers facing similar challenges. The workshop aimed at innovative methods to analyse and evaluate users' needs and requirements with regards to smart assistive home environments. The workshop addressed such questions as "which methods can use to evaluate early prototypes of intelligent but error-prone technology, where not all functionality is integrated (yet) or can only be used with certain limitations?", more information can be found on the workshop website (workshops.icts.sbg.ac.at/ami2008aal/), which will also include a summary of the results of the workshop.
24 November 2008
1. HERMES in Global Forum 2008
Recent results of the HERMES project were presented in the scope of Global Forum 2008 (www.items.fr/spip.php). Global Forum is an Annual High-Profile International & Independent Event dedicated to Business, Policy and Civil society issues affecting the successful evolution of the Information Society. The 2008 Global Forum has held in Athens, Greece, October, 21-22, and was co-organized by ITEMS International (www.items.fr) in collaboration with Hellenic Ministry of Economy and Finance (Special Secretary for Digital Planning) and The City of Athens. In the scope of the event HERMES Technical Director Prof. John Soldatos, presented how pervasive computing technologies are gradually penetrating Ambient Assisted Living applications for the ageing society. The talk included a presentation of the interfaces of the HERMES project (www.fp7-hermes.eu ), with emphasis on the HERMES multi-touch surface and the congitive training games that are developed on it.
2. HERMES Demonstrations in Large Scale Public Events
AIT demonstrated recent technology developments of the HERMES project in the scope of the Athens Digital Week (www.athensdigitalweek.gr) , a technology festival which was attended by more than 40,000 citizens. The demonstrations focused on:
29 October 2008
The beginning of Q3 has seen the finalisation of the "Technical specification and system architecture design" document, that has been submitted to the EC by early August.Activities of the technical partners focused then on the definition of the Infrastructure Integration and the System Verification Plan.During the Milan General Meeting (6, 7 October) the integrated architecture has been discussed and agreed between all the IT partners. The integrated architecture has been agreed as well as the common integrated database. IT partners also started working on the document with an internal workplan that will conclude the activities foreseen for this task in the first week of December leading to the definition of the broad lines of the integrated platform across which all communication between the components takes place. This will ensure the correct operation of the various modules and sub-modules, as well as the correct internal and external exchange of data. The technical requirements will include interoperability and data exchange requirements with existing components.TXT has started working also on the defintion of the system verification plan. This task will define the unit and system level tests, and plans for integration of the prototype and final system. This will enable the systems integration work to proceed in a planned and measurable way. A sound verification plan is essential in order to allow checking that consistent functionality and interoperability is achieved in the wide range of expected application scenarios and technical architecture flavours. Passing the tests in the verification plan will allow the system to be signed off. The approach has been outlined adapting the guidelines defined for the IEEE 829 standard. The final document will include clear description of the testing environment as well as the testing plan for individual subsystems and the integrated prototype. The schedule is similar to the previous mentioned document, so we will end up with the final version of the deliverable by the first week of December.
22 October 2008
Bradford researchers have participated in TrecViD'2008 video processing evaluation under the video summarization task, and the announced results put Bradford's entry within top 10, the processing speed is at top 3
27 August 2008
The first project milestone, the analysis of user requirements was finished at the end of August! Through user interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, memory assessments and other methods such as cultural probes in three different countries (Austria, Greece and Spain), the project partners gained more insight in the way older people interact with technology and particularly with technology that deals with forgetfulness. The requirements have been summarized into scenarios which in turn have followed into concrete use cases of the future HERMES system. In various deliverables this process hsa been documented, which can partly be accessed directly through the HERMES website!
In the next phase of the project, first interface prototypes will be developed that are evaluated with users throughout Europe to validate the user requirements and to iterate on the scenarios that define the technology.
15 April 2008
The vision of pervasive computing is to transform physical spaces into computationally active and intelligent environments, which provide non-obtrusive human-centric services regardless of time and end users location. A main characteristic of these services is that they are context-aware in the sense that they can automatically sense and perceive the status of their surrounding environment, and accordingly exploit this status in shaping their application logic. Numerous instances of context-aware services have been developed in research initiatives, but also in the scope of deployments in smart homes, smart conference rooms and systems for ambient assisted living (AAL).
In the area of ambient assisted living we are recently witnessing a growing interest for pervasive context aware products and services which target elderly users. This is largely due to falling fertility and rising longevity phenomena, as well as due to the proliferation of the ageing population all over the world. Ambient assisted living solutions for the elderly target a variety of assistive functionalities such as social integration and decentralized communication support (e.g., supporting interaction with friends and relatives), as well as e-health and e-care (e.g., facilitating caretakers and minimizing the need for hospitalization). Most pervasive systems and services for the elderly employ usually one of the following prominent approaches to ubiquitous computing and context-aware systems:
Smart spaces provide the less obtrusive approach to implementing human centric services for aged users. The later are not likely to be familiar with ICT technologies and devices, which makes the natural interactivity provided by smart spaces preferable. Nevertheless, application development in smart spaces is still a complex task, since it involves a wide range of highly distributed and heterogeneous hardware and software elements. An integral element of smart space applications are perceptual components, which provide information about the identity, location, activities and sometimes the goals of human actors through person trackers, person identification components and other situation identification elements. In addition to these development challenges, smart space applications for elderly users must extend their outreach outside the domestic environment given that user activities are not confined to the home environment. On the contrary, a variety of elderly user activities (e.g., shopping, doctor visits) takes place in outdoor environments. Hence, application development is made more difficult since developers have to deal with mobility, CPU-constrained devices, as well as their interaction with in-home systems.
The HERMES project leverages leading edge audio and video based perceptual processing components, which can be used to implement a wide range of ambient assisted living functionalities. HERMES relies also on state of the art application architectures which define structuring principles for integrating these perceptual technologies into added value applications for senior citizens. HERMES targets three families of such added value applications spanning the areas of memory aids, ambient calendar and cognitive training games. These applications can contribute to minimizing the cognitive decline for elderly users.
However, HERMES has to deal with some stringent requirements and constraints associated with building context-aware applications for elderly users. Specifically, speech processing applications and speech based emotion detection require customization to the peculiarities of elderly speech. Also, a number of usability issues are raised, given that elderly people are not accustomed to using devices and context-aware applications. A systematic and complete resolution of these important issues asks for a thorough and consistent understanding of end-user requirements, which is in progress in the scope of the first eight months of the HERMES project. Nevertheless, the availability of robust perceptual components and application architectures open up new opportunities in the area of the ambient assisted living applications for senior citizens. We envisage that the unique partnership between leading edge technology providers with usability and gerontology experts (realized in the scope of the HERMES project) will capitalize on these opportunities towards novel added value services.
1 April 2008
A questionnaire developed in order to collect the needs of elderly has been administered. The objectives of the questionnaire were: (1) To specify the needs of the elderly people that allow them to live in an independently and autonomous way; (2) To know the specific aspects of the user needs in which HERMES can offer help and the way it can do it; (3) To define which information is important for the elderly to be reminded.It has been administered to 63 people with and without memory complaints, when these people attended at Cognitive Training Sessions organized by INGEMA. Regarding the gender of the sample, 14 people were male and 49 female. The age average was 70.15 years, with a standard deviation of 6.30 years.Both, qualitative and quantitative approach were taken into account. The qualitative analysis consisted on the frequency of anwers given in the open questions. Unfortunately, not everybody answered these questions. The main results were the following:
The analysis of the quantitative approach, has produced the following results:
Finally, an attemp to find significant relations between variables has been done. The most statistical significant relations (p<.05) have been found between Range of age and being uncomfortable forgetting names (p= .07), and between Range of age and use of remembering strategies (p= .11). These relations imply that people with more age feel more uncomfortable when they forget names, and use more strategies in order to remember the things that they have to do.
2 January 2008
The HERMES project has officially started on the first of January 2008 with a project duration of 36 months, the project will finish in December 2010.
The kick-off meeting will take place in Vienna on the 16th and 17th of January.
