Search

In the last years introducing measures to face age discrimination and increasing work safety in production environments have become crucial goals. The present research proposes an innovative user interface exploiting Augmented Reality techniques to support frail people, mainly elderly, in everyday work on complex automated machines. It adapts its functionalities according to the user skill, tasks, age, and cognitive and physical abilities thanks to a set of knowledge-based configuration rules. A case study is described to illustrate the methodology to manage the complexity of configuration rules and the resulting developed platform.

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting independent living. However, an inventory of characteristics of smart assistive devices currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products and in particular to analyse their functionalities in order to understand if they can be considered inclusive and if they effectively match the needs of elderly. This review can be useful for researchers and designers of Ambient Intelligent Environments, to realise where efforts should be focused in order to match the demand from the elderly people’s side.

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting people’s independent living. However an inventory of characteristics of smart products currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products in order to: (1) understand if their features really match users’ needs, answering to the definition of assistive technology and, consequently, (2) understand if an environment embedded with SOs can be considered as assistive too, taking into consideration the attributes given by the definition of the SOs, of being embedded in familiar objects and immerse in the users’ surround.