Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2.6. Other “common” activities
2.6.1.
Shopping
Going shopping for food, clothes, etc. is an important activity that is carried out to
satisfy daily needs; moreover this task is also strongly related to the expression of
personality and autonomy of a subject. To maintain this service to elderly and people
who are not self-sufficient, the following three shopping services should be developed.
E-shopping services.
E-shopping can be carried out by developing the
catalogue/database of some shops of an urban network (or in a rural context) and
presenting the information related to their products and costs.
A person who stays at home can perform e-shopping using a tablet computer or a
standard PC or even a network connected TV. Thanks to a user-friendly interface,
subjects can log onto this service that recognizes the specific user and his or her
personal data; the utility should be conceived to guarantee privacy to subjects and to
protect personal information from external interference.
After having identified the desired products, consumers look them up in the
database:
to verify the presence of the items and their costs in reliable shops;
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to identify the shops where the products are sold at cheaper prices.
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Users then send their order to shops and then they receive confirmation or refusal
of their request. Where shops have the required goods, the shops inform the users of the
approximate time to delivery the articles. Thanks to this approach, products are chosen
by people at home and are delivered directly there.
This method of shopping can be extended to deal with public services, e.g. register
office, post office or health department. An easy to use and reliable electronic payment
service is needed in such a context. An example is the iDeal service offered by the
major banks in the Netherlands.
2.6.2.
Eat and drink
The welfare and the health of persons are strongly related to their nutrition. Supplying
these subjects with appropriate technological services can help overcome problems
related to malnutrition.
Services for the preparation of meals.
In many cases, preparation of the meal is a
complex and dangerous activity to carry out. Two solutions can be adopted to solve this
problem: delivering the meal direct to the user's home and using pots, pans or stove
with sensors for cooking.
Meals delivery service: delivering the meal directly to the persons' home is a
service that can be provided by connecting restaurants and canteens set in an
urban area in a virtual network; this restaurant network should share and
published information about the dishes prepared by these restaurants and
canteens in a common database. Restaurant managers should update the
database every day with data related to the kinds of foods, ingredients, calories
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