Easy Line Plus is an EU FP6 project that has been developed between January’07 to April’10. During this time a very challenging work plan involving interaction with end users, technical development, business perspective, dissemination activities, etc. has been put into place. The main conclusion of the project is that we have developed and user-validated a smart environment that supports independent living in the kitchen providing the following services:
-To facilitate the use of the household appliances adapted to the disabilities or preferences of the user and provide adapted human-machine interfaces.
-Provide useful information and warnings about the use of household appliances.
-Detect emergency situations and automatically take palliative actions: warn the user, switch off some appliances (e.g. the hob and oven in case of fire or the washing machine if water detected).
-Detect routine changes in the kitchen informing whenever there are changes in conduct patterns that can identify any loss of abilities in the user.
Besides many workshops with end users, healthcare and social professionals, formal and informal carers, the prototype has been evaluated by 90 beneficiaries and 31 formal and informal carers. It confirmed to have the right functionalities and user interface physically, sensory and cognitively accessible and usable for elderly and disabled.
We have found evidences that the system developed would prolong the time elderly and disabled people could remain independent in their own homes positively impacting their quality of life. Nevertheless, longer studies with larger user groups would be needed to confirm this.
An exploitation plan has been developed and started to be put into place: developments of the project are already commercial products, a university spin-off has been created and specific actions to turn the prototype into commercial product are being tackled. It has also become clear that complementary business partners are needed for commercialization, in particular local integrators and care solutions providers.
The project has used a multi-disciplinary methodology. From the human factors perspective, the focus was on accessibility, usability, usefulness and efficacy. The technology perspective focused on advancing the state-of-the art within RFID technology, wireless sensor networks, artificial intelligence, ubiquitous computing for ambient assisted living, user interaction and distributed software.
There is also need for further technical research within RFID technology, natural user interfacing and profiling, context reasoning and prediction.
Diverse methodologies have been put into place in Easy Line+; some of them are profusely used in the scientific community, while others have been developed inside the project. The following lessons have been extracted and are worthy to be mentioned:
-Short duration testing just provides evidences about the real impact of the system in user’s quality of life and in empowerment of independent living. Long duration tests would are mandatory to have scientific proofs.
-Evaluation methods based in questionnaires are not always reliable specially when fulfilled by elderly or people with special needs. This methods need to be completed by observation and interview procedures.
-The project consortium have created and maintained a strong local relationship with local end user associations and other stakeholders. This is absolutely key to have proper user feedback into the project.
-Defining research questions (from user, technical and business perspective) in advance of the field test gives a systematic structure to the evaluation process. It also makes possible to add any needed logging instrumentation to the prototype or preparing other data collection methods.
-Five partners developed different technical parts of the system. Integration plan and software engineering best-practice should be studied and adapted to the project at an early stage. It is also very convenient to define a technology testing plan that ensures system reliability and stability with qualitative and quantitative measures prior to proceed with user testing.
-Technical work it is more efficient to have short cycles of design-development-testing where the system is progressively built and evaluated by the end users. This also allows final outcome closer to end user needs.
-Business strategy has to be tackled from the beginning of the project as it can greatly influence technical development. In our case we have a working prototype however thesoftware needs to be rebuilt to become a commercial product.
In addition to the results of the user’s validation, there are important evidences about the quality of the work done in the project. Large amount of scientific publications have been produced by the project consortium; 16 referred journals, 4 chapters of books, 10 international conference proceedings.
Six patents (4 European, 1 German and 1 Spanish) have been already filed protecting different parts of the system developed.
Local and national impact through different mass media has been also promoted; To date the project has been presented or referenced at least 34 times in press and other broadcasting media.
