Development and field trial of a social TV system for elderly people

As the core of an innovative business model, we seek to develop an ICT (information and communications technology) platform called "Senior Cloud" that will activate communication among the elderly and utilize their knowledge and labor skills in the hyper-aged society of Japan, in which the percentage of people aged 65+ currently exceeds 21% of the total population. As one aspect of this effort, we studied what leads to the activation of communication among the elderly; specifically, we extended the viewing action and social graphs of the social TV system "teleda," which features VOD (Video on Demand) and SNS (Social Networking Service) functions. In this paper, we describe several experiments that verify the possibility of employing social TV systems to activate the elderly.