Abstract. Most people with Downs Syndrome (DS) experience low integration with society. Recent research and new opportunities for their integration in mainstream education and work provided numerous cases where levels of achievement exceeded the (limiting) expectations. This paper describes a project, POSEIDON, aiming at developing a technological infrastructure which can foster a growing number of services developed to support people with DS. People with DS have their own strengths, preferences and needs so POSEIDON will focus on using their strengths to provide support for their needs whilst allowing each individual to personalize the solution based on their preferences. This project is user-centred from its inception and will give all main stakeholders ample opportunities to shape the output of the project, which will ensure a final outcome which is of practical usefulness and interest to the intended users.
Information governance and systematic work with metadata and semantics are important elements of the implementation of an open, transparent, accessible, accountable, user-friendly and service-oriented public sector. Top management commitment is crucial in order to achieve necessary attention and sufficient budgets. Management needs to be aware of metadata and semantics as important enablers for the goals set forth in strategies and requirements from ministries. Documentation of economic potential and cost savings will help to get attention among decision makers, but today, few trustworthy sources are available. The development of cross-sector services and the demand for reuse of public service information, both in the public sector itself, but also for commercial services, underpins the importance of well-defined information. Participation in cross-sector e-Services demands the establishment of metadata repositories and ontologies as obligatory parts of the public sector information governance regimes.
The aging population, the increased incidence of chronic disease, the technological advances and the rapidly escalating health-care costs are driving healthcare from hospital and day care centres to home. The GUIDed AAL EU project focuses on the challenge of keeping older adults independent and functioning in their own homes for as long as possible, by facilitating important activities of daily living through ICT solutions. Through a modular and customizable smart home platform, backened system and Android application, assisted-living solutions and services are offered to facilitate seniors' daily lives in their own home and the community. The main target areas are smart home control, home safety enhancement, city navigation, nutrition and health improvement, and socialisation/communication. In this paper, we present three of the five GUIDed services and report on our findings from the evaluation of the High-Fidelity (Hi-Fi) paper prototypes for these services. The Hi-Fi prototypes were tested by older adults and their caregivers using focus groups in four European countries, namely Austria, Cyprus, Norway and Poland. The results showed that all of the users found the GUIDed system understandable and easy to use, which is an encouraging finding considering older participants' low technological literacy.
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