Impact

SOCIABLE will integrate, deploy and operate an innovative ICT-enabled on-line service for assessing and accordingly reinforcing the mental state of the elderly through pleasant gaming activities for cognitive training, while at the same time boosting their social networking and activating their day-to-day interpersonal interactions. SOCIABLE is envisaged as a service with high potential for societal impact that could add significant value to current service offerings of care services providers. Furthermore, it is associated with a clear business potential for sustainability and wider use by care service providers within (but also outside of) the SOCIABLE consortium.

Lessons learnt

The main lessons learnt from building and deploying the SOCIABLE platform, as well as from the pilot operations of cognitive training activities based on surface computers are:

1) Regarding the use of surface computers for cognitive training:

• Surface computers, notably multi-touch surfaces can create novel ergonomic and motivating environments for executing cognitive training activities that will be appealing to the elderly.
• Computer-based cognitive training can facilitate health professionals towards better managing cognitive training sessions and patients' assessments. The vast majority of health professionals that were actively involved in the project assessed positively the SOCIABLE services. 
• Cognitive training based on surface computing infrastructures is clearly beneficial to demented elderly. This is proven through the elderly testimonials, but also based on the assessment scores collected in the scope of the SOCIABLE clinical trials.

2) Regarding the developed applications and offered services:

• Elderly users are very keen on building their autobiography using the «Book-of-Life» applications. Results have shown that this activity improves their social activation.
• Different levels of difficulty for the cognitive training games can serve the needs of different target elderly groups (i.e. suffering from different forms of mild dementia).

3) Regarding service deployment & operation issues:

• The delivery of SOCIABLE services within both surface table and surface PCs provides good control over the total-cost-of-ownership of a SOCIABLE solution, thereby ensuring the potential ROI (Return-on-Investment). Surface tables are a viable option for care/day centers and hospitals. While SurfacePC/TabletPCs facilitate in-home deployments.
• The SOCIABLE services are appealing to care services organizations. The project has early on received numerous expressions of interest from care services organizations.
• A significant number of games (at least 25) are needed during a three-month session, otherwise sessions tend to become boring for the elderly participants.