SOCIAL HOUSING
3. Service model
The platform provides a simple and effective way to interact with the elderly, and is designed spe-cifically for professionals in social housing who wish to improve the way they communicate and provide services to their users, so that they become real customers. The manager of the housing service installs and manages the client-server architecture of the platform, this architecture can be configured as to adapt to the needs of the individual user. In addition, the service company can
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offer new business opportunities to traders and service providers that may establish agreements with operators of social housing, allowing them to enter into business relationships with elderly users through the platform.
The main parties involved in the business proposed by the HOST project are residents, especially the elderly and frail people; the managers of the structures of social housing; operators for in-stallation and maintenance of the ICT infrastructure; telephone operators; commercial operators;
service providers. Residents pay an economically viable subscription on the basis of their income to the operators of the facilities (this may be integrated in the share of rent of accommodation).
Managers of social housing provide with their own resources or public funds, to install and man-age the platform or in the individual users’ homes, as well as systems, and to install and maintain the platform relying on an ICT operator and ensure that the necessary infrastructure for interfacing with the telephone operator.
The cost of access to services will be covered in the form of monthly subscription which may be divided among the residents or their families, and telephone operators. In addition, the social housing cooperatives enter into agreements with a selected group of trusted services suppliers (maintenance, artisans, transportation companies, etc..) and traders (e-shopping, tourist agen-cies, etc..). On one hand, service providers and traders provide specific services to the users ap-plying discounts, on the other hand the cooperatives ensure visibility and relationships with loyal customers to service providers and traders. In this way, users can have access to commercial offers targeted to their needs and tailor-made services provided by trusted operators having, at the same time, more favourable economic conditions. The adoption of the platform by operators of social housing is therefore a situation of win-win-win.
5. Conclusion
The HOST project enables new application scenarios of ICT to improve the quality of life of peo-ple with special needs such as the elderly and frail persons, extending from positions in the ICT market niche to the broader sector of ordinary housing. The work done so far has confirmed that the context of social housing is definitely a scope and impact of particular relevance where ac-cess to effective and reliable service packages selected directly by users and a better quality of communication adhering to the expectations and the ability of older people are able to give them greater autonomy and a stronger social inclusion, preventing improper forms of sanitation or in-stitutionalization
References
Biocca, L., Morini, A., Padula, M., Paraciani, N. , HOST: Tecnologie intelligenti per servizi personalizzati rivolti agli anziani residenti in alloggi sociali, L’Edilizia, Speciale ITC-CNR 2011, pp. 123-126, estratto dalla rivista Structural, n.
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INTRODUCTION: TRUST IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS
Stefan Johansson and Jose Angel Martinez-Usero1
More and more commercial, non-government and public organisations expect end-users to inter-act via internet. Most face to face services in geographically remote areas are taken away. At the same time, the part of the population that does not regularly use the web is around 20% in ICT-strong countries and even higher in countries with lower rate of broadband etc.
A large part of the non-users are elderly. This is a target group that would benefit enormously from ICT-based solutions to everyday problems. Still very few take the step. What is needed to make services worth using for elderly that do not normally chose the internet as the means of communi-cation? The technical solutions exist, now we have to focus on trust.
Funka Nu AB has investigated and tested pay-services, digital kiosks and web based services directed to elderly users. The overall goal is to make elderly more independent through ICT. But the level of usage is still very low and one of our conclusions as to why, is that the target group doesn’t trust the services provided. We present the result from our research and user tests from several projects
[1] Funka Nu
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