Inspiration
We are inspired by the current crisis affecting the vulnerable and the lack of support for those who are in need.
What it does
This project aims to help the elderly via technological means whereas human factor is also considered as an asset. We know that the elderly cannot read well due to sight loss after some age, also, due the age, they would not search for news around, so there is a real need to give them clear recommendations and updates during crisis time, also to help them access to social workers, health care professionals and volunteer groups. Therefore, a website is created for this intention, by taking into account text-to-speech and speech-to-text technologies as well as conversational agents for interactions between users and the product.
How I built it
We created a website with WordPress for the News Feed and two-sided communication. We created the content for some countries such as Poland, France and Spain to show the functionality of our design. In our implementation, considering the needs of the elderly, we made the prototype as simple as possible so that it can be used with screen readers or text-to-speech tools. Moreover, we also give the elderly an option to connect with us through a contact form for seeking help. For the future work of the project, we thought of speech-to-text implementation on our website through a button on home page, so that the elderly would not need to interact a lot with the interface and the conversational agent would understand the content from the speech and reply via speech accordingly. Artificial Intelligence is considered at the back end of the website. Moreover, automatic extraction of content from governmental pages is also considered for the future work.
Challenges I ran into
Limited time to finish all implementations and find associated risk groups, as the elderly is not the accessible part of the population.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Being a researcher; computer engineer and psychologist&counsellor. Having specialized in natural language processing and having been educated in international environments for about 12 years at reputable institutions.
What I learned
The power of teaming up for challenging issues in the world and working on solutions together in solidarity.
What's next for ConfineHelp:Helping the most Vulnerable during Corona Crisis
The necessity is that social workers, psychologists and healthcare professionals support this project, as well as technological firms, as the technological solution needs some implementations, such as conversational agents, natural language processing solutions, or other handy solutions such as mobile applications, creation of new networks etc. Also, some efforts are required by the governments, as the aim is to reach at the elderly, and it is not easy to find them via casual means. Therefore, cooperation between governments is necessary and funding from European Commission is considered as an essential part for this project.
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