Connecting Senior Citizens through Interactive TV

Abstract:
We describe a semantic recommender system for interactive TV services adapted to the task of building and improving communities of senior citizens. Although senior citizens are traditionally seen as late adopters of technology, they may be the part of society that could profit most from online communities, due to reduced mobility limiting face-to-face contacts. While it is expected from young internet users to use multiple social networking sites and other online services, this task seems particularly difficult for seniors. Therefore opportunities for social interconnection that appeals to people of all ages are very limited. Our approach is to provide these opportunities to senior citizens by integration of new tech-nologies to the known TV medium with ease of use. We propose a semantic recommendation system based on interactive TV specially tailored to the needs of senior citizens. In this paper, we show the planned use of applying our recommender system in the SmartSenior environment.