DALIA - Virtual Assistance for More Safety

The European Active and Assisted Living (AAL)-project DALIA is designed as an integrated support system for older persons. By connecting with informal caregivers and formal care services the independence of older persons is promoted, enhancing the feeling of safety of both the assisted person and the caregivers.

DALIA provides modular services for social interaction, reminders (appointments, medication), determining the individual’s state of wellbeing and giving motivational advice through a unified user interface.

Virtual Personal Assistant Provides Support

One of the innovations of DALIA is the user-oriented design based on speech recognition and speech output in the form of a virtual personal assistant. This design has been developed in close cooperation with real end users.

Another innovation is the security feature for sensitive data based on the principles of proxy re-encryption for authorised users and “blind cloud computing”, which ensures that sensitive data stored in central components is always encrypted.

Finally, the modular architecture of DALIA can be seen as an innovation in itself, since it allows end users to adapt the system to their individual needs and makes it easy to integrate additional modules to broaden the spectrum of support. A user-friendly approval facility allows primary end users to give certain users restricted access to specific features such as related informal or formal carers.

DALIA is based on a mobile platform using state-of-the-art technology and works with devices which are already used at the elderly person’s home to keep hardware requirements low.

End User Participation in Four Countries

Over forty users (older persons and informal caregivers) from four different countries

• Austria,
• Switzerland,
• Netherlands,
• Luxembourg

were involved in the development and evaluation of the project results in DALIA by participating in workshops, interviews or field trials.

As a result of this project, the Grazbased company exthex GmbH is currently transitioning the DALIA prototype into a marketable product under the brand name “e-nnovation – smart solutions”. The first successful steps have already been made and the concept for “Emma – Flexible Living Assistant” received the eAward in the “Human and Health” category in 2016.

Consortium Manager

exthex GmbH

Further Project Partners

• Graz University of Technology
• iHomeLab, Lucerne University of
• Applied Sciences and Arts
• Stëftung Hëllef Doheem
• 't Dijkhuis
• terzStiftung
• TP Vision Belgium
• University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• Virtask B. V.
• Volkshilfe Steiermark GmbH

Participating Countries

Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland

Project Coordinator

Jakob Hatzl, MSc
E-mail: jakob.hatzl@exthex.com