BRINGING THE ELDERLY INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF E-SOCIETY: THE VITAL PROJECT Ingo Zinnikus, Klaus Fischer, Jan Alexandersson DFKI GmbH Stuhlsatzenhasuweg 3 66123 Saarbrücken Germany Unai Diaz†* †INGEMA Usandizaga, 6 20002 Donostia-San Sebastian Spain ASTRACT In the not-so-distant past, senior citizens often disappeared from the mainstream activities of society. In the EU project VITAL, the aim is to encourage users to go out of home, to travel, to meet other people, to participate in events; in summary to have an active and self-satisfying life that will empower aging citizens to play a full role in society, to increase their autonomy and to realize their potential and finally to improve web usability for digitally disadvantaged persons. Elderly users have special requirements with respect to user interfacing approaches and home delivered services. VITAL proposes the combination of iTV technologies, agent- based services and innovative multimodal interfaces as the best way to overcome the reluctance elderly users show to the introduction of information technology. KEYWORDS E-Citizenship and Inclusion, Information Systems, Intelligent Agents, Social Integration 1. INTRODUCTION Our seniors deserve better quality of life and more integration into the mainstream of the society. Fulfilling the needs of elderly people is one of the most imperative problems in Western societies that still have no adequate answers from the responsible authorities. The progressive ageing of the population in most Western societies and the need to provide better services to a larger number of users present an important challenge to the responsible authorities because, in spite of the important increase of resources, they are unable to cope with the exponential increase of the demand. There is general consensus about the fact that the best way to improve this situation is the progressive introduction of technical aids to allow the users to achieve a more independent life by means of remote assistance. However those services still suffer from poor levels of efficiency and quality due to the intensive use of manpower and the low penetration of information technologies. But social demands are not the only reason to attend the needs of elderly users: the increased period of retired life, the continuous growing in the number of persons in this category and the improvement of their economies will make elderly users one of the leading social groups to consider when evaluating customer’s purchase decisions and hence elderly users will become one of the dominant economical market sectors in the near future. Elderly users will demand more and better services and more important they will have the necessary resources to force the attention of public and private organisations to their needs thanks to their increasing political (through their vote in elections) and economical power. The new period will be characterised by a considerable increase in the number of persons in this category (see Figure 1), a significant increase of the period of retired life, a general improvement of the health conditions at any age range (that nevertheless will IADIS International Conference e-Society 2009 259