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Web Posted on: August 4, 1998


Equality service, accessible for all citizens, in particular Elderly and Disabled

 

Ms. Susanne Ng-A-Tham

VRMC Rijswijkse weg 60 POBox 16.300 , NL-2500 BH, Den Haag The Netherlands

Tel: +31 70 402 08 24, fax: +31 402 08 27, email: susanne@euronet.nl

 

 

  1. . Summary

    Equality (UR1010) is an initiative of 6 European cities that co-operate with local commercial partners in developing services for disabled and elderly citizens which will improve their quality of life. One of the main requirement deriving from this objective is that the services developed should be easy accessible from outside and within the citizens homes. The Equality partners have developed about 21 services which can be categorised in safety services, tele-assistant, tele-shopping and tele-aid services, home care services, public information and communication services. The project currently counts about 30 users per validation site. Each of the validation sites is looking for national resources to further implement the services on a larger scale.

  2. . Introduction

    The objective of the Equality project is to demonstrate how the quality of life of the less-favoured European citizens in urban areas, can be improved by providing integrated social, health and local civic teleservices, using generic multi-media telematics value-added delivery systems. During the last 2 years the project has achieved this objective through the following project life cycles: User need, Functional Specification, Building demonstrators and Validation. In addition the consortium has identified the exploitation plans to give partners information on how to exploit and commercialise the developed products. More information regarding the project can be found on the Equality website (www.denhaag.nl/equality)

  3. . Developing services for citizens

With the help of users (citizens) the Equality cities have identified the requirements for the applications which citizens need. In each validation site a large number of users was interviewed to set the requirements for this phase. Based on this information and the technical specifications derived from the user requirements cities developed their applications. Each of the applications/services was validated and if necessary modified to meet the technical and user requirements. Now, 2 years later, the applications are ready to be implemented on a broader scale and enable other citizens to benefit from these services.

 In conclusion it is shown that the most important information in this chain is the user requirement phase. If the information gathered in this phase is insufficient and inadequate the chances for a successful development and successful implementation of the service, that meets the needs of the user, are few to none. In the Equality project, STAKES (FI), one of the equality partners, was assigned with this difficult task to co-ordinate and execute this task simultaneously over 6 validation sites. With the help of the SNRU (Newcastle) the user requirement phase resulted in an excellent analysis of the user needs on a broad context covering 5 areas:

  1. The individual level (End user requirements)
  2. The business level (Service provider requirements)
  3. City level (Information society -city level requirements)
  4. Ethico-legal requirements (society level) and
  5. Hands-on experiences from a dynamic proto

 

The main results of the user analysis showed that users (citizens and service providers) did not have real life experiences with telematic applications. The systems had to be simple and a lot of user assistance and training should be included in the implementation of the service. Based on the user opinions a ranking was made of the importance of 25 services in the field of information, interactive, ordering and payment services. The importance of security services, e.g. first aid, fire alarms, fault services, exceeded 90%. "A citizen’s information desk" consisting of e.g. time, weather, health and social security guidance, local support and advice services, time tables and event calendars was considered useful (60-80%). Within the User requirement phase Equality has also emphasised the Ethical legal requirements when building services for citizens. Remarkable from this result is that more than half of the elderly and three out of four of the disabled were willing to participate in the EQUALITY project at the demonstration phase. Willingness to participate in the project depends upon, which kind of benefit the interviewee estimated to get of the new telematic services, and how the interviewee estimated his/her own chances as a PC user. With the information on users expectations and their needs and requirements partners specified the functional specifications for the demonstrators to be build. Using a generic model to specify all the demonstrators and also including the organisational requirements and changes to be realised in providing a service for citizens, each of the services was validated through the use of 'the 'Equality User Validation Assistant'. This tool, mainly based upon the 'User Validation Assistant' developed in the framework of the EU BASELINE Project, enabled an in-depth analysis of the services developed. The total number of users involved in this phase, including both end-users (disabled and elderly) and intermediaries (social operators, service provider operators, etc.) directly involved in the Service Validation Phase was 193.

 

  1. Conclusion

The Equality project has demonstrated how the quality of life of the less-favoured European citizens in urban areas, can be improved through it's mutual co-operation of it's partners, the services it has developed and the impact of the services on it's users. By combining knowledge, experience and expertise of the partners, the project has been successful to realise it's objectives. With the EU dimension in the project, service providers have been made aware that they can easily exchange information with other service providers in the project to increase their own service provision.

However the citizens, especially disabled and elderly, have benefited most of this EU co-operation. Through the development of these services users now have easy access to home services, shopping services and community services through different technologies. Even though it seems that the disadvantaged user might have some difficulty to keep up with the new developments, the inclusion of this group ensures the inclusion of all citizens for different services. Improving the quality of life for them eventually results in an overall improvement of the quality of life for all of us. The quotes of users who have been involved in the development of these services are speaks for it self. "The system opened doors which seemed to be shut to me when I got ill." "I feel safer within my home now that I have this system." But also the real success stories of citizens, emphasis the need for these services. One of the users decided, at the age of 50, to get his degree to provide professional help to users who had the same experiences like him. Another user became an author and wrote about his disease and how he coped with it. A majority of the users who never had any contact with people other than their social worker, now met people who were in the same situation; they did not feel alone anymore. They had friends with whom they could associate. This is the reason why we are developing these services to involve users, and enable them access to services which will increase their independence, their ability to help themselves, their quality of life and include them into society, thus paving the road towards our future; a better one.



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