Virgilius project, financed through AAL Joint Programme, is a research and development project which started in June 2012 under the management of Telespazio SpA (Italy) in consortium with: Rartel SA (Romania), Arx iT SA Consulting (Switzerland), National Philatelic Museum (Romania) and University of Geneva (Switzerland).

The objective is to provide support services for elderly people to enhance their quality of life in terms of autonomy and safety during outdoor and indoor activities related to personal health, recreational and travel.
Services offered by Virgilius will be based on ICT technologies and in particular on outdoor localization and navigation service based on GNSS technology and indoor navigation and guidance using a network of sensors installed inside a building and embedded in the user terminal.

The proposed system/service will support the well-being of elders by supporting two basic components of Well-Being: Health and Life-Style. Current existing services to dependant elders are mainly focusing on presence detection of the person at home, based on solutions and devices connected through home fixed phone. The primary objective of the project is to extend these services to more unfavorable environments, including when the person has left its home environment. The interest is twofold:
- Social interest for the elders to extend their mobility and freedom space of action with the security of being kept under appropriate support
- Support and preserve the person Well-Being (through Health and Quality of Life) guaranteeing a high level of the autonomy as well as enhancing the person individual sense of confidence, autonomy, competence, security and safety.

The project aims at empowering the elders to continue living actively and independently.
With the support of the end-users, it will be possible to deploy the solution in various European countries: Italy, Switzerland and Romania.

http://www.virgilius.eu/en/index.html

This work is supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNDI– UEFISCDI, project number AAL-11, 4901 / 31.05.2012.