GeTVivid

Equipping an older adult’s home with different technologies is not the solution to create a perfect home environment but already available technologies hold the ability to make a useful contribution. The TV as an integral part of peoples’ everyday life can be found in many homes and is therefore one of the most widespread and familiar devices that influences people lives. While in former days the TV has been mainly used to retrieve news and as a medium for entertainment, Internet access has promoted the development of interactive TV.

GeTVivid aims at supporting older adults with mild impairments to manage their daily activities in their home and aims at improving the quality of life, autonomy and participation in social life. Our overall goal is to design for “natural” and easy-to-learn interactions that will lower cognitive demands and allow older persons to keep regular contact with people. Therefore, a platform connecting TV devices will be developed based on the HbbTV standard and complemented with a mobile second screen. Through push and pull customised information and services can be provided to the older adults. The access will be on-demand either by changing to a specific channel, pressing a button on the remote control or touching a button on the mobile front-end. By applying user-centred design the users and their activities, goals and characteristics are placed in the centre of the development process, i.e. the specification of potential services will be explored within this project together with them. As HbbTV is a rather new technology to many users and application developers, it will be crucial to get to know the affordances of the digital material (HbbTV) by exploring the properties (e.g., the combination with a second mobile screen).