Project ALFRED: Personal Interactive Assistant for Independent Living and Active Ageing

ALFRED’s objective is to develop a mobile, personalized assistant for elderly people, which helps them to stay independent, to coordinate with carers and to foster their social inclusion. ALFRED is specifically dedicated towards older people and is fully focused around their needs. ALFRED will run for three years with a total budget of 4.440.741€, involving eleven partners from five European countries.
ALFRED, a new European Union funded research project, has officially kicked off. Representatives from eleven consortium partners, from five different European countries, met at project coordinator Ascora near Bremen, Germany, to discuss and to coordinate the work to come. The ALFRED project is co-funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework programme on ICT. The project will run for three years, as from October 2013.

ALFRED will realize a mobile, personalized Butler, created using cutting edge technologies such as advanced speech interaction, making it possible to talk directly to him. ALFRED will thus be very easy to use and will provide context-sensitive services related to social inclusion, care, physical exercise and cognitive games.
Dr. med. Mehmet Gövercin, deputy head of the Geriatrics Research Group at Charité and head of the aging and technology working group: "ALFRED will provide an innovative approach for improving the life of elderly people with the help of a fully voice controlled, virtual assistant. This will help people to benefit from a range of digital services in their daily life. To reach this goal, the project brings together core experts of different fields from the medical and ICT domain."
The ALFRED research project aims to contribute to a society, where older people will be able to live at their own homes independently and actively participate in economic and social life.

The foundation of ALFRED consists of four core elements:
1. A User-Driven Interaction Assistant to allow elderly people to ‘talk’ to ALFRED and to ask questions or give commands;
2. A Personalized Social Inclusion unit, to suggest social events to the user by considering his or her personal interests and social environment;
3. An Effective & Personalized Care unit for better care, by allowing medical staff to access information from the elderly, generated by (wearable) sensors
4. A Physical & Cognitive Impairments Prevention unit, that provides serious gaming (games and quests) to improve the physical and cognitive condition of the user

The results of the project will be tested at three pilot sites at different European countries, with the objective to pave the way to the market and implementation in society. The pilots will take place in three different environments and will count with the participation of more than 100 users. The profile of the participants will include not only elderly users but also formal and informal caregivers.
More information will be published at the project website: www.alfred.eu

--

For personal information please contact the coordinator:
Sven Abels, abels@ascora.de, Phone: +49 4222 – 805 850 10
ALFRED is co-funded by the European Commission under the FP7-ICT-2013 call 10. IT has been approved under Grant Agreement 611218 with a total budget of 4.440.741€. ALFRED is coordinated by ASCORA GmbH, Birkenallee 43, 27777 Ganderkesee, Germany.
E
Partners: ASCORA, ATOS, WORLDLINE, CHARITE - UNIVERSITAETSMEDIZIN BERLIN, AITEX, TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET DARMSTADT, NATIONAAL OUDERENFONDS, TALKAMATIC AB, E-SENIORS, TIE NEDERLAND, IESE BUSINESS SCHOOL

This text may be used for any publications without the need for written permission

Ascora GmbH is an SME IT company, based in northern Germany (Lower Saxony). Since 1994 we have been developing and selling software as an Independent Software Vendor with products that are used around the world. In 2007, we extended its range to provide business solutions as well. We offer IT consulting services to national and international companies. We are involved in several projects within the research and innovation domain. We offer a variety of services, with the main expertise in the domains of system integration aspects and the development and prototyping of SOA based solutions (services).
We are highly active in the eHealth domain and have organized the workshop about SOA in Health Care at the recent GI conference in the course of the ongoing research project (SAMBA) in sponsored by the BMBF and is also active in the EU AAL programme. We have broad knowledge in secure data management of health information including patient data and device information.

Ascora GmbH
Dr. Sven Abels
Birkenallee 43
27777 Ganderkesee, Germany
Phone: +49 4222 – 805 850 10
eMail: abels@ascora.de
Website: http://www.ascora.net

This release was published on openPR.