The Urge for Empirically-informed Design of Social-Oriented AAL Applications – The Example of 2 AAL Projects

In this paper, we show that contrary to other AAL assistive technologies, which are somehow mandatory for an autonomous living at home, the use of social interaction services is not a necessity by itself, even if it contributes to a better quality of life. For this reason, the integration of the future end-users into the design process is all the more needed to get a continuous feedback and foster the usefulness and acceptability of the services. More generally, to ensure a higher acceptance and successful adoption of these AAL technologies, we claim that it is essential to adopt socio-technical approaches and methods, which take into account the needs of daily life and subtle aspects of the home into the design process. We therefore illustrate the Living Lab approach we have defined and applied within the framework of two projects from the second call of the AAL Joint Programme. These projects, FoSIBLE and PaeLife, aim at designing Information and Communication technologies to effectively enhance the social engagement of the elderly. We finally discuss how these insights can inform the design process.