A Middleware Architecture for Designing TV-Based Adapted Applications for the Elderly Carlos Gacimart´ ın, Jos´ e Alberto Hern´ andez, and David Larrabeiti Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Avda. Universidad 30, 28911 Legan´ es, Madrid, Spain {cgacimar,jahgutie,dlarra}@it.uc3m.es Abstract. The elderly are begining to use more and more new tech- nologies, although several times they find these are difficult to interact with, especially when they are accessed by a keyboard or the screen is too small. This work proposes a middleware architecture for TV-based appli- cations for the elderly, with a focus on social interaction services like webmail. The elderly feel very confident with their TVs since it is some- thing they use on a daily basis, and the screen is sufficiently large. The architecture contains a Context Manager with an Ontology that models the elderly user impairments and actual context information collected from sensors located at the user’s home, and an Interface Adaptation Engine which generates the adapted interface for a particular user, ac- cording to his profile and context of use. This architecture is part of an ongoing EU funded project: MyUI 1 and a first prototype is expected by mid 2011. 1 Introduction In the last century, global life expectancy at birth has risen from 58 years in 1970-1975 to 67 years in 2005-2010, and is currently beyond 80 years for some developed countries, namely Japan (82.6 years, first ranked), Australia (81.2 years, fifth ranked) and Spain (80.9 years, sixth ranked). In developed countries, such an increase of longevity, together with the observed decrease of fertility, has a clear social impact: the elderly population is expected to nearly double by 2050 [1]. In light of this, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the elderly are expected to increase their quality of life in the forthcoming years. The elderly are slowly embracing new technologies either because they are beginning to acknowledge their usefulness in daily tasks, but also because new technologies keep them close to the younger generations, especially their sons and grandsons. Also current generations which now demand technology will be technology con- summers in the future. However, it is still the Television the preferred home appliance for the elderly. Indeed, it is the people beyond 65 who spend more 1 http://www.myui.eu J.A. Jacko (Ed.): Human-Computer Interaction, Part I, HCII 2011, LNCS 6761, pp. 443–449, 2011. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011