Virtual Community Support In Telecare

A few virtual community support systems, with some unsophisticated tools, appeared at the beginning of the era of Internet availability and pervasive computing. Ever since however, many such systems have emerged focusing on classified interests and motivations, and aiming to give people more possibilities to socialize and keep in touch with each other. A growing population in Europe, the elderly, can benefit from the provision of such virtual communities and their services in order to maintain and promote their independent living, and to support their optimal mental, emotional, and physical health and well being. The development of virtual community service in TeleCARE is based on multi-agent systems, and in particular the mobile agents provide a rich paradigm for information brokerage in networked environments. This paper provides an overview of Virtual Communities and its benefits, it also briefly describes the design of a support service on top of a multi agent infrastructure, developed within the TeleCARE project, to facilitate elderly’s participation in virtual communities.