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The first part of this chapter reviews the design, implementation, and customer experience with the OLDES SW tele-care platform developed within the EU project Older people's e-services at home. The OLDES solution has been successfully tested at two different locations: in Italy with the participation of a group of 100 seniors (including 10 senior citizens suffering from heart disease), and in the Czech Republic, with the involvement of a group of 10 diabetic patients. The suggested OLDES approach proved to be an effective solution for municipalities, hospitals, and their contact centres for providing health and social services. The project partners therefore decided to develop a second generation of the system called SPES (Support to Patients through E-Service Solutions), which started in April 2011. The SPES project aims at transferring the original approach and results achieved in implementing the OLDES focusing on new target problem domains: dementia, mobility-challenged persons, respiratory problems, and social exclusion. © 2013, IGI Global.

EU project OLDES (Older People’s e-services at home) develops easy to use and low cost ICT platform in order to offer a better quality of life to elderly people directly in their homes through innovative systems of tele-accompany, tele-assistance and tele-medicine. The elderly are able to access the services and send relevant medical data from their home by being connected to the central server via a low cost PC which is based on Negroponte paradigm. The OLDES platform interface uses television screens controlled through a remote control customized for the elderly. The feasibility of OLDES project is evaluated by the pilot study concentrating on compensation of diabetic patients. Compensation of diabetes is achieved by monitoring glucose glycemia level, blood pressure and weight. Moreover, the patient feeds into OLDES system daily consumption of food using interactive food scales and obtains advice if necessary.

With the growing number of senior citizen, Europe is going to face major challenge to deliver care for them. The OLDES project funded by the Information Society Technology Programme of the European Union is exploring how ICT can help in the cost-effective scaling of the care delivery while also improving the well-being of elderly people. Designing a caring system is intrinsically complex because of the personal dimension and the many stakeholders involved across multiple organisations boundaries with different cultures. This paper describes the approach taken in OLDES to produce a design able to cope with the needs of the various stakeholders. Rather than following a traditional "requirements to design solution", a co-constructive approach was taken where the multiple actors, including patients, carers, social services, services managers were involved. A distributed animation tool was used to support this approach, enabling validation through various graphical representations of the system behavior. The resulting platform still, under development, will be tested in two major European towns: Bologna and Praha.