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Bringing independent living services to market requires common service platforms that connect service providers to elderly people and informal carers. Realizing such common service platforms is challenging as issues like organizing model, openness, governance and subsidization models have to be decided upon. This paper elicits trade-offs in designing ICT platforms for independent living services by developing three generic value network configurations. We do so through an action design research project in which series of workshops and stakeholder interviews are done.

In the UK, over six million people are unpaid informal carers for an ill, frail family member, or a friend who can’t manage to live independently, or whose health or wellbeing would deteriorate without their help. This saves the UK taxpayer over £119 billion a year (Carers UK, 2011). Although the role and experience of informal carers is unique to their situation, it is known that their health suffers and that they have an increased rate of mental and physical health problems.

This paper presents results of user evaluations with a socially assistive robot companion for older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and living (alone) at home. Within the European FP7 project “CompanionAble” (2008-2012) [1], we developed assistive technologies combining a mobile robot and smart environment with the aim to support these people and assist them living in their familiar home environment.

Background Diabetes mellitus is a major health problem in all age populations, with complications that adversely affect the autonomy and quality of life of patients and their kindred ones, with a heavy demand on health care resources.

To tackle the problem of training the careers of senior citizens numerous educational options may be attempted. However, the emerging complex puzzle of the diversity of training needs for the aforementioned trainee group, consisting of a mixture of formal and informal careers, calls for a careful and perhaps more radical than the usually attempted approach. To this extent, this paper describes elements of the innovative efforts followed upon the training design of the DISCOVER EU project.

Expected benefits of smart home telecare services do still depend on the capability to develop and validate systems which may foresee or react in an intelligent way to situations demanding specific support to patients, informal carers or authorized staff. Together with wireless sensor networks or broadband communication infrastructures at home, it is needed to create models and methods to solve how a smart home might think and act in identified home care contexts.

Due to the successes in medical science people are now beginning to live much longer. With this brings increased problems associated with ageing, with one exemplar being dementia. Persons with dementia require care with activities of daily living, for example, with washing, dressing and eating. This requires additional care, which is usually provided by family and friends who assume the role of informal carers. Provision of care by informal carers brings irreversible changes to their lives that can lead to depression and feelings of loneliness.

There is not only a lack of research that conceptualises the information needs of informal carers but also a shortage in research that addresses those needs from the perspective of information systems in the health care system. This shortage of systematic and conceptualised research on information needs of informal carers often prohibits the information providers and developers from knowing what types of information informal carers need to support their roles and tasks as carers and to evaluate how well they are fulfilling the information needs of informal carers.

Telecare is thought to be a solution for the increasing healthcare cost of an aging population. We want to identify possible issues in telecare implementations to inform technology design. By analysing telecare literature using the Locales Framework it was found that there is a gap in telecare technology research in designing awareness or presence (known as the mutuality aspect in the Locales Framework) between the elderly and their informal carers.