Final results of the NINFA project: impact of new technologies in the daily life of elderly people.

Background: The paper presents the work carried out within NINFA (iNtelligent Integrated Network For Aged people), a project for the wellbeing of the elderly people at home.

Aims: The impact of new technologies on elderly people is evaluated with respect to the three main topics faced by NINFA.

Methods: NINFA was structured into three main topics: (1) active user engagement from the very beginning of the planning stage: the use of specially designed questionnaires to evaluate the acceptability of new technology in general and robot caregiver specifically; (2) assessment of the well-being through non-invasive techniques: natural language processing for language change monitoring in elderly subjects; (3) automated assessment of motor and cognitive functions at home: systems to deliver tests and exergames through user interfaces compliant with elderly subjects.

Mass media health information: quantitative and qualitative analysis of daily press coverage and its relation with public perceptions.

Objective: This paper describes the methods followed by the Pisa University OCS for collecting, storing and analyzing all health-related articles and database contents. Moreover, an example population survey on the topic of food safety based on such analysis is shown.

Methods: Articles published each day since 1999 in Italy's three most popular newspapers are collected and stored in a Data Base Text; on these articles quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted.