Project: Voice Controlled Assistive Care and Communication Services for the Home

Acronym vAssist (Reference Number: aal-2010-3-106)
Duration 01/03/2011 - 01/06/2014
Project Topic The goal of the vAssist project is to provide specific speech/voice controlled Home Care and Communication Services for two target groups of elderly people (people suffering from COPD and people suffering from fine-motor skills impairments). The main goal is the development of simplified and adapted interface variants for tele-medical and communication applications using multilingual speech and voice interaction (and supportive graphical user interfaces where necessary). vAssist aims to enhance the perceived quality of healthcare services and to enable a reduction in the costs related to their production and delivery by achieving channel independence in the delivery of vAssist services, so that existing HW and interfaces in the home of the users can be used (PC, TV, Mobile Phone, dependent on what the users have in their homes). Further, the vAssist consortium considers user, technological AND economic constraints in a sound methodological set-up throughout the whole project duration (with user participation throughout the project). From an interface point of view vAssist leverages approaches to connect to universal interfaces in the delivery of AAL services (e.g. UniversAAL, I2Home, etc) and provides user-specific voice-assisted interfaces in order to address a wider audience. However, vAssist’s aim is NOT to develop another platform for service and interface integration, but to develop specific modules in order to enhance existing services with voice and speech intelligence. Existing platforms like the ones above-mentioned are considered in the exploitation strategy and technical design of vAssist services. The result of this project is a speech and voice interface for a specific set of communication and tele-medicine services along with specific hard and software developments to provide these services in the older users home in a cost efficient way. For each of these services a business model (from economic point of view) is developed and evaluated with users.
Network AAL
Call Call 3 – Self-serve Society

Project partner

Number Name Role Country
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH Austria
ASICA France
Assistance Publique- Hôpitaux de Paris- Hôpital Broca France
CURE Center for Usability Research & Engineering Austria
ESIEE-Paris France
EURAG Österreich Austria
Institut Telecom France
Integrazioni e Sistemi SpA Italy
PL.O.T EDV-Planungs- und HandelsGesmbH Austria
SAS Moby View France
Shankaa SARL France
Wind Telecomunicazioni S.p.A. Italy