A P2P platform supporting virtual communities to assist independent living of senior citizens

Framework

PeerAssist is a project funded under the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme, Call 2 (Project Number 2009-2-137).

AAL aims to enhance the quality of life of older people and strengthen the industrial base in Europe through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The motivation of this funding activity is in the demographic change and ageing in Europe, which implies not only challenges but also opportunities for the citizens, the social and healthcare systems as well as industry and the European market.

Duration

PeerAssist started on September 1st, 2010, and concluded on June 30th, 2013.

Scope

The main scope of the PeerAssist project is the conceptualisation, design, implementation and demonstration of a flexible Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platform, which will allow elderly people (not necessarily familiar with ICT technologies) to build virtual communities dynamically based on interests and needs they share. The PeerAssist platform will facilitate establishing on demand ad-hoc communities with friends, family, neighbours, caregivers, facilitators, care providers, etc., based on shared interests and communication needs. The community building and the P2P interaction will be achieved using information extracted from peer roles, profiles and user modelling, context that describes the overall user environment, and the specific request initiated, or service provided, by a peer, all of which are represented semantically in a machine understandable form. An end-user request (query) is first represented semantically and then routed through the network in order to find semantically matching peers.

Funding

The overall project budget is 2,147,151.35 €.

Following the AAL principles, contribution is shared between national and European funds. The total funding is 1,411,604.51 €.

Demo

If you want to see a demo with some of the capabilities of PeerAssist, please click here.