A user-driven approach to developing ambient assisted living systems for older people: The SOPRANO project

This chapter describes some of the results of the EU-funded SOPRANO project to develop an Ambient Assisted Living system to promote active ageing and ageing-in-place. The chapter outlines SOPRANO's experience and application research approach to ensure that end-users are involved in all stages of the research and development. A number of key areas for application development were identified and developed as a set of use cases (or descriptive models), for example for medication reminding, and to support exercise. These use cases were further refined through visualization and iterative prototyping techniques with end-users to ensure usability, usefulness and acceptability for users. The SOPRANO prototype system is described together with future plans for deployment in demonstration sites and field trials.