i2home–Towards a Universal Home Environ- ment for the Elderly and Disabled

Despite the last decade’s research and new insights into humanmachine communication, much of today’s technology is too complicated to use, e.g., [6]. This is true for consumer electronics as well as household devices—much of the cutting-edge products do not fit in an every-day environment for every-day users. Current home automation solutions are for technophile users. The lack of intuitive or even understandable interaction concepts actually opens up the market for profitable business companies whose business model is centered around the idea of helping people out as they fail in installing or use newly bought computerized technology. For elderly and disabled persons the situation is even worse. At the same time, these people form exactly the user group that could and should profit the most from modern technology. i2home, a EU-funded project, has as its main goal to develop technology for elderly and persons with mild cognitively impairments that supports them in their daily life in their digital home. Rather than developing interface technology for a few, one of the project’s main allegations is design-for-all. This is further underpinned by the methodology chosen: the project is build around the user-centred design (henceforth UCD) paradigm. One of the main ideas with UCD is to include the users of the technology right from the start. In fact, their needs and requirements are the driving force behind the development of the technology. Some of the main obstacles for possibly remotely managing the digital home in a convenient way are that remote control devices usually are device oriented, device dependent and tied to specific target devices. Therefore, the project implements the Universal Remote Console (URC) standard [3, 8]. This approach makes it possible to develop user interfaces that are generic, individually adaptable and allows for controlling multiple devices seamlessly, i.e., in one coherent user interface. The i2home consortium consists of nine partners from five countries and brings a wide variety of experiences, ranging from definition and implementation of open standards over industrial software development to contact with target users etc.