El Mayor conEctado, Relacionado y asIsTIdo

The project "El Mayor conEctado, Relacionado y asIsTIdo" - EMERITI seeks the incursion of voice assistants currently available in the day to day of the elderly. 

Currently, voice assistants such as Google Assistant (Google), Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft) or Aura (Telefónica) enable a communication interface that can be used by seniors in a very natural way and has great advantages of accessibility over conventional methods such as a keyboard or touch screen. The natural language recognition systems presented by these assistants have improved considerably in recent years and enable a communication interface that in the past presented many problems in its final implementation. 

Simultaneously, IoT (Internet of Things) devices invade the market and allow any household appliance or element of the house to have an Internet connection and be able to act on it remotely. This is where the integration of voice assistants with these devices comes in: it is possible to use a voice command to perform certain actions on the devices such as, for example, turning on a light, the TV, raising a blind, lowering the heating or even making a call or video call. 

Existing technology allows all these actions to be carried out and can be of great help to the elderly. Home automation is no longer an expensive product and IoT devices make it possible to connect it with voice assistants, making the communication interface with it simpler and more natural. 

However, the main problems presented by these technologies are the immense variety of devices, configurations and integrations with other available technologies. For this reason, the project seeks to identify which technologies are best suited for use in the day-to-day lives of older people. 

The project will investigate how to use these assistants fundamentally around three axes: 

- Improving accessibility to new technologies in the daily lives of the elderly and identifying the barriers that these devices can pose for the elderly: voice assistants can present difficulties at the beginning of their use, so it is vital to identify them and investigate best practices in their use. 

- Encouraging the use of this type of assistants to maintain contact and communication with family and friends in the simplest and closest possible way: voice assistants allow you to make calls, video calls and queries much more transparently than a menu on a device, simply through a conversation is possible to contact a relative or friend. 

- Assistance in daily tasks that become difficulties in the aging process such as handling devices at home such as raising and lowering blinds, shopping, remembering to take medication, etc.. The assistants suppose in this point a perfect ally in front of interfaces that are complicated to use as to configure the thermostat of a house, or to approach services of purchase online to greater than they have never used a service of this type. 

Therefore, in order to carry out this research, the following specific objectives are considered to be developed during the project: 

- Study of the state of the art of voice assistants and their use by the elderly. 

- Study of the use of voice assistants for the control of domotic and electronic devices in the daily life of an elderly person. 

- Study of the use of voice assistants for communication with family and friends and the use of purchase and assistance services. 

- Elaboration of a guide of good practices in the use of voice assistants and their integration with devices and tasks of the daily life of elderly people showing how they can help them in their aging process. 

The EMERITI project has two main lines of action, one eminently investigative and innovative and the other focused on the applicability of voice assistants and their correct integration in the day-to-day life of the elderly. 

The first line will identify the main deficiencies in the voice assistants, will carry out a taxonomy of the devices that can be integrated and, finally, will investigate the integration of these assistants with devices with which they currently do not have a communication linked to the use of the assistants to improve communication with family, friends and the environment. 

On the other hand, the project presents an eminently practical line in which the elaboration of an implementation guide of an intelligent home for the elderly with these technologies is looked for that is accessible in a public way and that allows in a simple way to install these devices without having advanced technical knowledge and realizing the smaller economic disbursement possible.