MonAMI - Mainstreaming on AMbient Intelligence

Services provided by digital TV, mobile telephones and the Internet will support daily tasks and increase quality of life for elderly in their home environment. MonAMI will demonstrate how accessible, useful services and technical aids can be delivered in mainstream systems and platforms to the elderly population of Europe. 

C-LAB is working with 14 universities and companies from seven European countries in the most extensive EU-funded project ever in this area.

These types of services and technical aids already exist, but only in small scale laboratory environments in different parts of Europe. MonAMI will bring them together and evaluate them on a large scale in this project, led by the Swedish Handicap Institute. 

Previous European projects have shown that technological augmentation of the living space can help alleviate the problems of daily living, increase quality of life and reduce the need for institutional and other care. MonAMI builds on these results and aims to move such services from the laboratory and small scale demonstrators to the status of mainstream technology, and will focus on services, platforms and usability.

Bouquets of services and applications will be selected and developed with a "Design for All-approach" together with potential users. 

Platforms to deliver services in different areas will be developed and tested.  Areas where the new services will be provided are: safety and security, health, communication and information and comfort applications.

Hundreds of users will try out the services in their homes and the impact and consequences will be analysed. The economic viability and long term sustainability of the services will be addressed in order to facilitate real mainstream implementation.

The C-LAB work is focused on accessibility testing and evaluation with accessibility engineers and small focus groups from organisations of persons with disabilities. The approach will be first to

• collect user requirements of persons with different disabilities.
• identify user requirements of persons with different disabilities by observing a small number of individuals living independently in their daily environment.
• verify user requirements of people with different disabilities against accessibility related standards and against general requirements identified in the project.

Accessibility tests will be carried out and mainstream products will be evaluated using the developed solutions in combination with commonly used assistive technology. These tests will be performed by accessibility engineers and a selected group of representative end users with different disabilities in special Usability labs in different locations.

Project funded by: EU IP
Project duration: 09/2006 - 05/2011