The demographic situation in Germany, the high social cost, the economic power of older people, but not at least the demand of old people themselves, to live a self-determined live are important facilitating factors to initiate projects, were new ways of care and support of independent living are tested. In this context ICT offers innovative chances. A number of stimulation programmes and projects at the various policy levels are initiated in Germany. Some examples are:
Within the project " Man- Technology- Interaction in the Information Society" the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) together with the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology (BMWI) support R&D projects with the objective of developing interdisciplinary systems solutions for user-friendly technologies.
Project "MORPHA - Intelligente Anthropomorphe Assistenzsysteme' aims to develop components and systems for communication, interaction and co-operation through intelligent mechatronic systems. Amongst other things the systems are tested in scenarios 'robot assistent" in household and care.
The Berliner Institut für Sozialforschung (BIS) is realizing different R&D projects regarding "elderly people and ICT", but mostly on local or regional level:
"Seniors on to the network": Project together with the T-Berkom within the framework of the initiative ' Fit into the information society';
Assessing the Application of the 'Design for All' Approach;
"Technology and living for elderly people";
"Smart Home for elderly and disabled people"
Furthermore the Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF is running a programme within the framework of the nursing care insurance (Pflegeversicherung) called "Model-program to improve the supply of people with need of care" The main objective of this programme is to realize forward-looking ideas in the German insurance system and in our opinion there are possibilities for the implementation of new technologies in the care system. Main emphasis lies on the development of fundamentals dealing with the provision of people who are in need of care.
The project "Integrated domestic technique for elderly and disabled people" within the framework of the EU- research programme TIDE is undertaken by the "Fraunhofer Institut Arbeitswirtschaft und Organisation".
A range of projects regarding older people and ICT were launched in the last years and brought a lot of interesting results. Moreover, it was the special merit of ICT-projects for older people, that the topic became more and more interesting for representatives in the social and political field. They had to realise that old people are interested in ICT-application and that they can really have a benefit using it. The project-time was over before really sufficient solutions were found and the practice implementation could not be supported anymore by those, which had the experiences. Beside adequate project duration times, there often is a need to implement applied projects in a larger scale, to test the use of ICT also within networks of older people.