Eliciting user requirements for ambientassisted living: Results of the SOPRANOproject

The SOPRANO project is developing supportive environments for olderpeople based on the concept of “ambient assisted living”, using pervasive ICTs toenable older Europeans to live independently in their own homes. A feature of theExperience and Application Research (E&AR) methodology used in the project isthe active and strong involvement of older users throughout the entire R&D process.Participative methods in the area of research and development enable to thoroughlyfocus on the users when defining the user requirements, iteratively generating designsolutions and evaluating those design solutions in real life settings. This paperpresents the results of the first phase of user research carried out in SOPRANO inorder to determine user requirements for the system. After describing the need forambient assisted living and E&AR approaches in a first section the paper presentsmethods and results from participatory requirements engineering. It concludes withan outlook on the next phases of user involvement.