Active Ageing Agents

Abstract

Supporting active and healthy ageing is important both to improve the quality of life of elderly citizens, help them contribute to society as they grow older and to reduce unsustainable pressure on health systems. From social networks to health and fitness, a lot of mobile devices applications (apps) are being developed every day. The variety and availability is such that people start to think that indeed “there’s an app for everything”. Many of these apps address either problems or characteristics that affect older people and that are related with the ageing process (e.g. memory and visual aids apps). They can effectively help people and are under constant evolution. However, the lack of knowledge about these available technological aids can undermine its dissemination and consequently the help that people really receive, especially those who need it the most: older people. In order to tackle the afore mentioned barriers, particularly those related to the profusion of aid apps and the difficulties it creates to the user to select the appropriate ones, we envisage the development of a multi-agent recommender system. The system will combine the results of different algorithms in order to propose the appropriate apps.