Independent Living Services Project Archive

The social housing sector has the potential to gain enormously from trans-European telecommunications networks and applications, and in doing so radically to improve the quality of provision of housing to disadvantaged groups in the interest of the public at large. Housing provider staff operates over wide areas on a daily basis, providing a strong demand for online service provision and support to processes. Trusted eWork Services based on handheld computers will enable far-reaching integration of the work of mobile housing staff into business processes, and the replacement of contractual documents currently executed on paper by providing the means to sign documents on site with secure mobile network access.
The Trusted eGovernment Services are to both enable tenants to use public services online from TV-internet terminals and include a business-to-administration change of tenant service to replace time-consuming paper processes with secure online flows of information between housing provider and local authority processes. Personal data of tenants relating to care provision but also data on their consumption of electricity and other resources will be made available to tenants and authorised personnel online in a secure fashion in Trusted eAccess Services. Coupled with remote metering, the latter service will enable effective cooperation between tenants and social housing provider in optimising use of resources and contributing to sustainability. Finally, care provision to elderly residents is addressed in Trusted eCare Services, which provide both the means to deliver video-based care services into tenant homes and the tools to coordinate personal delivery of care between the different professional groups - medical, social, housing - involved. Seven leading social housing providers in three Member States with the largest of social housing participated in this market validation. The services are already in current roll-out plans of the seven consortium members, in common with many other providers of social housing in Europe. Social housing providers belonging to the membership of European association CECODHAS intend to deploy a range of new eBusiness services which engender the trust and confidence of all their users and represent best practice in the field of social housing.

IST@HOME has build a series of EC R&D projects providing low-cost set-tops for video-telephony, requirements for remote medical supervision, solutions for network QoS, powerline domotics, video services workplaces and other components. The project built an affordable and usable video-telephony system to design home and care-provision systems for elderly people. It comprises a small movable camera, a set-top box for a TV and a handheld service pad. Together, these components enable users to see, talk to or seek assistance from professional carers in real time, over the Internet. The IST@HOME systems are on show in Portugal Telecom’s exhibition centre and have been demonstrated by Johanneswerk, a service provider under the German social welfare organisation of the Protestant church, and hospital/care providers. The project partners, funded under the European Commission’s IST programme, installed the complete system in homes in Germany, Belgium, Spain and Portugal and tested it for six months. They also produced portable video-communications devices which can be carried from room to room. With the size of an A4 sheet of paper, these devices are standard tablet PCs with a video camera.
Older users and service staff expressed great appreciation for the project’s services and systems, with most of both groups saying they would like to use them in the future if possible. Both groups also rated the video quality acceptable to very acceptable at the data rate used, which was typically 256 kbits/second.

The project involved upgrading access infrastructures in properties of the over 100 million tenants served covered by the European housing association CECODHAS, enabling or improving access to housing services and third party service providers. Workflow was introduced to support key processes maintenance, metering, placement, general query handling or security as well as provision of third party services such as care or support. The aim was radically to improve service delivery processes and hence quality of living environments for all income and age groups.
The target market for @Work4Homes solutions is very large. The huge importance is reflected in the membership of CECODHAS. The 37 full members of CECODHAS are national and regional housing organisations from the 15 EU member states. There are associate members in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Russia, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland. The full list is as follows: Belgium, Danmark, Germany, Spain, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, UK, Czech Republic Estonia, Hungary Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovac Republic, Switzerland (associated), Bulgaria (candidate). Every 4th European, some 100 million people, are provided with housing by a member of CECODHAS.
The services developed in this project together make up a new way of providing housing, a "virtual" housing service enterprise. Such a virtual enterprise uses new access methods and process support tools to supply a new quality of housing service. From a user perspective, @Work4homes services provide the following:

• supplier users (mainly SMEs) such as maintenance contractors will be able to accept contracts for maintenance and report progress online through any of multiple access techniques, performing their work fully integrated with IT-supported business processes in the housing provider organisation.
• teleworking employee users of the housing provider organisation will, from home and from mobile settings, be able to access company information and to take part in business processes much as if they were in the head offices of the organisation, enabling them to perform their on-site or out-of-hours tasks that much more effectively.
• tenant and owner users will be able to interact with housing providers from their living room in a very user-friendly fashion, will be able to receive advanced services such as videotelephone-based support services as well as having access to high-speed internet and digital TV , also provided by third parties.

staff carrying out collaborative projects at national and European level will as users have access to state-of-the-art collaboration tools to support their work, hosted by specialist providers working with national and European associations.

The TEN-Care project established a comprehensive and integrated technical, organisational and process-oriented approach to the care of elderly people and other patients at home and launched viable segments of the approach as independent business and/or operational services in the European healthcare market by setting up in the European market a set of services for delivering or improving primary healthcare, particularly for elderly people based on advanced telematics.
The TEN-Care approach has provided user-oriented, organisationally and technologically integrated applications and services, meetin the needs of patients and care providers. The TEN-CARE projects has:

• improve public health information services by providing access to information services and making appropriate data available for the purposes of prevention, diagnosis and therapy
• improve continuity of care and healthcare management by providing rapid and secure access to patient-related information and supporting essential information flows between hospitals, GPs, social service providers and patients (including teleconsultation)
• provide effective telemedicine by linking points of care and patients’ homes, implementing teleconsultation and telediagnosis services, improving communication links to emergency services and applying standards

CANS demonstrated viable uses of multimedia telematics for supporting marginalised citizens (migrants) across the EU. It developed a remote mediated service model that allows a local authority or other service organisation to better support citizens in a more accessible, efficient and effective manner locally, nationally and internationally. Focus was given to developing a Service Model consistent with Design-for-All principles for target user groups who have particularly demanding and urgent communication and service requirements. These are migrant citizens, disabled citizens and elderly citizens for whom CANS linked service provider experts in different member states and provided applications such as interpretation, advice and training. Direct human support (via videotelephony) was supplemented with integrated database information support where necessary (e.g., via Internet) to combine the benefits of human contact with remote access. The technical solutions include H.320 videotelephony on Euro-ISDN networks. The project brought together service providers, telecommunication suppliers and specialist support partners to identify the target user and service organisation requirements, install the necessary applications and perform the demonstrations. The activities focused on practical verification, impact analyses and strategies for exploitation based on feedback from users and service providers. Seven Telematics Applications Sites (TASs) were implemented and inter-linked by Euro-ISDN to facilitate better communication between service providers, their clients and support professionals. Key Project Participants included Alcatel SEL (DE), London Borough of Camden(GB), Stad Kortrijk (BE), City of Joensuu (FI), North Western Health Board (IE), Stichting Instituut voor Doven (NL), Faculdada de Motricidada Humana (PT), empirica GmbH (DE), Portugal Telecom (PT)

In January 1992, the RACE II project TeleCommunity was started, to trial support services, using videotelephony, for people who needed professional care.
The Advanced Communications Experiments (ACEs) of TeleCommunity investigated the use of residential videotelephony in the Social Sector to maintain the care of the ever increasing older population and to promote the integration of older and disabled people into society, work and education.
These ACEs used a mixture of CATV, Analogue Broadband and ISDN networks. The sites of experiment are in:

• Belgium - Kortrijk ACE with Stad Kortrijk, BARCO, Gaselwest and OCMW (75 CATV users);
• Germany - Frankfurt ACE with Alcatel SEL, empirica and Frankfurter Verband für Alten- und Behindertenhilfe e.V. (15 CATV users and 5 ISDN users) and in Meinerzhagen ACE with Ev. Perthers-Werk and Bosch (30-60 CATV users);
• Finland - Tampere ACE withVTT, Sondi Oy, City Mission of Tampere, Tampere Telephone Company (43 Analogue Broadband users); and Vantaa ACE with VTT, Sondi Oy, City of Vantaa, Helsinki Telephone Company (11 ISDN users);
• Norway - B rum ACE, with SINTEF REHAB and B rum Kabel Rykkin Health & Social Care Centre (10 CATV users and 10 ISDN users);
• Ireland - Sligo ACE with CMIS and North Western Health Board (15 CATV users);
• The Netherlands ACE with Instituut voor Doven (15 ISDN users);
• UK ACE with Interaction Design Ltd, Royal National Institute for Deaf People and Camden Council (5 Analogue Broadband and 15 ISDN users);
• Portugal - Lisbon ACE with Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa (FMH), TLP and INESC (10 ISDN users);
• and Sweden ACE with Telia, DALTEK and University of Stockholm (15 ISDN users).

The total number of users was nearly 400.
The objectives of the project are:

• to set-up experiments that examine the ways both the community at large and the social welfare institutions can use videotelephony based applications to reduce cost of social care, both directly and indirectly as well as aiding the integration of older people, people with hearing impairments (especial those who are deaf) and people with an intellectual impairment, into the community at large and especially into schools and work places and away from specialist and residential institutions;
• to identify the usage requirements for enhanced videotelephony-based services to make them usable to majority of residential users including the older persons and people with disabilities so that they can be served without special assistive devices and such services are at least usable and universally understood as the telephone.

The European Community's R&D Project, "Application Pilot for People with Special Needs" was started in 1989. The project was the first experiment of two-way video-commnications on Cable Television (CATV) networks with signaling and voice also carried in-band on downstream and upstream channels. The results from the four sites (one in Germany and three in Finland) showed that residential users could use and wanted video-communication. The evaluation, after operating in Frankfurt am Main for more than two years, showed that two-way video-communication based services for eldery people are well accepted and have made a postive major impact on the lives of the 15 people that participated in that trial. The interface to conrtol cable TV network had worked satisfactorily and the redesigned remote control unit was very acceptable to users. A videophone within a TV set was acceptable both from lighting, camera and microphone settings point of view as well as from an economic concept of a "set-top". The service provider organization is now using video-communication based support services to reduce costs and to increase the efficiency of the services currently provided. The partners in APPSN were: SEL Alcatel AG, Nassauische Heimst tte, Bosch, empirica, PTT Nederlands, CSELT, VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland), Swedish Telecom, CET/CTT (Portugal Telecom), FMH (Technical University of Lisbon), London HCI Centre.