+TV4E: An Interactive Television Platform as a Support to Broadcast Information about Social Services

Abstract

In the last decades almost all countries face the increasing of elderly population [1]. Given these recent changes, there have been appearing a several number of gerontechnologies to enhance seniors’ quality of life. In this context and despite the strong investment from the Governments to disseminate services like distance help or provision of medical information, the level of success is still very low. Possibly this failure is due to the fact that most of these approaches requires the user to search for the information (a "pull-oriented" activity from the user's perspective) rather than a "push-oriented" where the user receives the information. Television (TV) is one of the privileged resources to reach the general population, but it is an even more powerful way to achieve older people, limited to their home or in institutional context, due to the fact that almost all seniors are familiar with a TV set. Elderly are commonly in a disadvantaged position, for not knowing how to access public and social services they can benefit from (e.g. medication discounts, medical appointments, etc.). Regarding this, it is being developed an iTV platform (+TV4E) which aims to disseminate information about public and social services for seniors, by interrupting the visualization of linear TV content with audio-visual content about these services. In order to broadcast the information that elderly viewer most need and want to receive, it will defined a set of user profiles. The profiles’ definition will be achieved throughout a set of selection phases, and the first phase involves the definition of the individuals that will be able to interact with the +TV4E. In this paper is presented a set of criteria for the first filtration of users who can benefit from this type of iTV services and the respective services that they can be interested in receive information about