Designing Smart Home Environments for Unobtrusive Monitoring for Independent Living: The Use Case of USEFIL

The “Unobtrusive Smart Environments for Independent Living” EU funded project is proposing an integrated system (USEFIL system) which intends to cope with ageing problem providing advanced, affordable and unobtrusive monitoring and web communication solutions for seniors living independently. The USEFIL system enhances social care and medical service provision by exploiting “frugal” ICT solutions such as low cost “off-the-shelf” technology and unobtrusive monitoring technologies to develop services that will assist the elderly in maintaining their independence throughout their daily activities. The project adopted the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) to design and develop the USEFIL system because this methodology incorporates all those principles, practices, and procedures to help us meet USEFIL systems' objectives. Aim of the paper is to demonstrate the use of the DSRM process to design an ICT solution for the case study of ICT technologies for assistive living environments for elderly people. More specifically using the theoretical lens of the Design Science Research Methodology theory the paper presents the necessary steps that have been conducted to design the USEFIL system. The USEFIL system was implemented and validated over a three year period with elderly people, their unofficial carers and doctors. Results demonstrate that the technology readily succeeds in meeting the study's initial objectives. Although the project is still running and the design specification of the USEFIL system is under continuous update, the main modules that have been designed and realized will be presented in the paper.