Older People's e-services at home

The number of old people in the EU is dramatically increasing and the related burden in term of public expense getting higher and higher – these are the two main reasons motivating the OLDES project. Today more and more old people are living alone, in many cases with no families helping them nor enough money to afford private carers. Getting inspiration from these facts, OLDES will work to plan and implement an innovative technological platform, with low cost and easy use able to provide a wider range of services to an higher number of elderly people, so to face the situations described above. The platform will be tested by 100 elderly people in Italy (10 of them affected by heart disease) and a sample of diabetics in Prague. Mr. Paruolo, Bologna Municipality’s Deputy Mayor for Health, firmly wanted this project; he believes that the welfare model has to be changed and renewed quickly, making the most of new technologies and high tech devices to offer a wider number of old people tele-medicine, tele-assistance, tele-entertainment and tele-company services. In this way it will be possible to enlarge the number of people assisted by public services, even if public resources are decreasing whilst the number of old people increases.