Project: Going on line: my social Life

Acronym	Go-myLife (Reference Number: aal-2009-2-089)
Duration	01/07/2010 - 01/01/2013
Project Topic	In our increasingly dislocated and mobile society, online social network (OSN) sites are proving valuable in bridging distances and facilitating interaction and communications. People are spending a significant amount of time at the top social network websites in order to manage existing relationships with friends, reconnect with old friends, share media and find new contacts that have similar interests. Fulfilling these needs is just as important for elderly people as it is for everyone else, but for many reasons can become increasingly difficult. In spite of this need for social contact, elderly people, even confident internet users, tend to miss out on the benefits of OSN platforms. Go-myLife is intended to address this need. Conventional OSNs were started with young people in mind and have only slowly expanded to include older demographics. Their culture can therefore seem alien and inaccessible to elderly people. Go-myLife will therefore provide an OSN platform built around the needs of elderly people. On the other hand, elderly people are keen to maintain contact with the different generations of their family and to contribute to mainstream discussion and debate. Go-myLife will therefore not be a separate OSN for elderly people but rather a platform, fully integrated with existing OSNs, from where elderly people can post messages and receive updates and take part in discussions across a variety of other OSNs, thus bringing existing communities together. Elderly people need to be supported while they are out and about and given reasons to leave the seeming security of their home. Go-myLife will therefore be designed as a mobile OSN platform, optimized for access via a Smartphone. It will capitalize on the GPS, compass and accelerometer functions of modern Smartphones to provide access to context-aware services so that users can be alerted when friends or family members are close by, to facilitate opportunistic face to face social contact.
Website	visit project website
Network	AAL
Call	Call 2 – SOCIAL INTERACTION

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
	Andago Ingeniería S.L.		Spain
	ATOS ORIGIN SOCIEDAD ANONIMA ESPANOLA		Spain
	Centre for Social Innovation		Austria
	Fundacja na Rzecz Kobiet JA KOBIETA (English: Foundation for Women’s Issues )		Poland
	Institute of Communication and Computer Systems		Greece
	IS Communications Ltd		United Kingdom
	Knowledge Society Association		Poland
	THE 451 GROUP LIMITED		United Kingdom