Personalizing Support to Older Adults who Look for a Job with the SpONSOR Platform

Nowadays the loss of job of people close to retirement and in general in old age is a reality shared by many European countries. This condition causes serious difficulties for older employees when returning to the job market and inevitably leads to a deterioration of their emotional state and well-being. On a different perspective, following the concept of active aging, the fact that older people continue to perform volunteering activities exploiting their skill and abilities is extremely positive for their well being. Volunteering job is, however, known for being very volatile and dynamic with people leaving activities, often, after a relatively short period of time. The SpONSOR project tries to help this particular segment of population by creating a platform that facilitates the effective match between demand and offer of work integrated with services particularly tailored for older people. A specific contribution is related to the personalization of support to workers obtained by specializing plan-based technology to generate interactions over time able to adapt to users and give them a sense of care. The paper contains an overview of the project by presenting hints from the user requirements analysis and an overview of the software architecture. Additional details are given on a module called “Personalized Interaction over Time” (PIT) dedicated to synthesize tailored suggestions for users during their long lasting interactions with the software platform.