Project: Hear Me Feel Me - Compensating for eyesight with mobile technology

Acronym HMFM (Reference Number: aal-2008-1-041)
Duration 07/07/2009 - 07/07/2011
Project Topic The HearMeFeelMe (HMFM) project aims at developing ICT-based systems that provide elderly people who have visual impairments with an easy, simple and intuitive way to access information and digital services in their home environment, allowing them to have equal opportunities to participate in the essential activities of everyday life, retain their independency, avoiding dependency on others in order to access information and services, and improve the quality of life and individual wellbeing. Different degrees of vision impairments are inevitable results of growing old, as the physiology of our eyes changes with time when the eye tissues loose their flexibility and suffer from damages caused by everyday life, different health conditions (such as diabetes or blood pressure) and gravity. Our possibilities to prevent vision impairment with technology are very limited, but there are promising possibilities to support visually impaired elderly in better managing their everyday lives with modern ICT. The HMFM project explores the services related to (a) medication and medicine related information and services, and (b) health monitoring and diet information. Enabling technologies for the services will be mobile devices and near field communication (NFC) technology. NFC is an emerging user interface technology that is expected to become common in mobile devices by 2012 (ABI research). The technology partners in HMFM aim at developing their NFC offerings to meet the challenges of wide-scale adoption. Mobile devices provide vision impaired people a non-discriminating tool to access mobile services and information and to compensate the lowered eyesight with other senses. Service provider partners aim at developing new services they can offer to their clients immediately after the project, and at improving their future capability to innovate and implement new ICT supported service solutions.
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Project partner

Number Name Role Country
Caritas Foundation Finland
Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired Finland
Fundación ROBOTIKER Spain
National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos" Greece
Nokia Corporation Finland
Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles Spain
Oulun 6. Joutsen apteekki Finland
Technical research centre of Finland Finland
ToP Tunniste Oy Finland