The main innovative feature of the ELF@Home project is that it is a fitness platform specially designed for the elderly. Although there are a few commercial products for monitoring exercises with Kinect, none of them are designed for older people and most of them would be too complex for them.

But ELF@Home is genuinely easy to use. You do your daily fitness exercises in your own home. A Kinect device captures your movements and feeds the data into a Mini-PC which runs the actual application. Data on heart rate and blood pressure from a wireless pulse oximeter and a blood pressure monitor is also sent to the PC, while a TV set serves as both monitor and user interface. ELF@Home checks your health before and after the exercise, reports back on your condition and creates a personalised fitness plan based on your exercise and health data.

Visitors to the booth at ICT 2015 will be invited to try out the prototype. They will be able to interact with the application by gestures or voice; and to self-measure their heart rate and blood pressure as they do some fitness exercises. While they are guided through some exercises by the application they see a representation of their body on screen. This way visitors can assess for themselves how ELF@Home supports active and healthy ageing and helps the elderly to live independently at home.

Project coordinator Juan Luis Carus thinks the future of ELF@Home looks promising: "Older people from Sweden and Spain have been involved from the very beginning. They participated in early tests, proposed new ideas and helped us improve the design and usability. They were very keen and really looked forward to have ELF in their own homes. In November we start with the end users tests. Then we will see if ELF@Home can really improve their lifestyle and prevent frailty."

ELF@Home is an AAL Joint Programme project.

At ICT 2015 from 20 – 22 October in Lisbon ELF@Home can be found in the Connect-area.

ELF@Home in the ICT 2015 catalogue