Development of system for supporting social participation in consideration of elderly people’s life style and community

Abstract

Social participation, such as having interpersonal interactions and participation in community activities contribute to a high level of quality of life for the elderly. However, an effective way to promote social participation has not been fully established. Conventional service recommendation technologies have several limitations including no consideration of one's health status, no transport arrangement and no consideration of one's feelings. In this study, we proposed new service recommendation system which is consist of two functions. One is to recommend a service which takes into account the status of a service usage and experiences service users had in the past. The other function is to create a plan for a day using multiple social services available in a community. We used the developed system in Minamisoma-city, Fukushima, Japan and evaluated its usefulness.