BMBF-Project "EMN Moves": Match-Making

Project started on November 2011 and is to be finished in October 2014

Ute Schmid, Michael Munz

The aim of the "EMN Moves" project is to improve the life of senior citizens living in Upper and Middle Franconia by the help of other senior citizens and volunteers living nearby. Mobility barriers are to be dissolved by creating "chains of mobility".

The project consists of several elements. You can find more information about the whole project and the project partners on the project website.
Our group concentrates on creating the so-called "Matchmaking-Service" prototype which shall be able to find other senior citizens or volunteers to plan activities or appointments for helping each other.

The Matchmaking-Service

The Matchmaking-Service will be a web-based application that helps people to find persons in their neighbourhood who offer support in various ways.

This starts with basic assistance, e.g. helping elderly persons living on a high floor of a building to arrive on the ground floor securely in order to be able to go shopping. But it goes one step further. The elderly person might even have trouble to arrive a distant shop. So again, he or she needs someone to take him/her to the destination and back home afterwards.
The web platform will accept "offers" by senior citizens and volunteers who have time and would like to help other elderly persons, while senior citizens are able to announce their needs which can be found by authenticated volunteers to get into contact.

A big challenge is the matching of personalities. For example if a senior citizen, who loves to go to an opera but does not dare to travel a long distant alone, announces this 'need' on the platform to find someone to join him/her, then this senior citizen might have some restrictions concerning the person he/she wants to join, for example this could affect the gender of that person or he/she wants to travel with non-smokers only.

The platform shall be able to handle such restrictions and find a person whose profile is suitable, but of course there are other restrictions concerning time and place which have to be checked for compatibility

internal activities

  • Oct/31/2014
    • end of project ?emn-moves?. Big thanks to everyone who was involved in the project and also thanks to the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) which gave us the opportunity to participate on the project. We hope the research we did will help senior citizen in the future improve their mobility and social life.
  • Oct/23/2014
  • Oct/17/2014
  • Jul/24/2014
    • Konsortialtreffen at Joseph-Stiftung in Bamberg
  • Jul/10/2014
    • walk through of MoNa software functionalities with employees of SOPHIA (1 pm until 5pm)
  • Jul/03/2014
    • MoNA software training of SOPHIA employees at SOPHIA (1 pm until 5 pm)
  • May/05/2014
    • Volunteers who are going to use the system "MoNa" are given personal help while using the system. Use cases which are still unclear by volunteers are going into  a refinement phase to further improve usability
  • Apr/19/2014
    • newspaper article about the awarded district of Bamberg's "Mayersche G?rtnerei" at "Fr?nkischer Tag", article(270.9 KB, 1 page) (in German language)
  • Apr/14/2014
    • official information day organised by SOPHIA. District "Mayersche G?rtnerei" in Bamberg is awarded with mobility logo "Das mobilit?tsfreundliche Quartier" (mobility friendly district)
    • MoNa software is presented to the public, poster(1.5 MB, 1 page) (A0 format)
  • Apr/10/2014
    • Konsortialtreffen in Erlangen at GEWOBAU, presentation(3.5 MB, 19 pages)
  • Apr/01/2014
    • a fork of the MoNa software is migrated to servers of Sophia at Sophia's place, because they want to use the software only via intranet
    • MoNa is still available to other project partners via servers of the University of Bamberg
  • Mar/28/2014
    • 3rd user training of volunteers with MoNa software at Sophia in Bamberg
  • Feb/06/2014
    • Konsortialtreffen in Nuremberg, at Geronto-Psychologists, presentation(1.1 MB, 22 pages)
  • Jan/31/2014
    • 2nd user training of volunteers and eliciting the usability of MoNa at Sophia in Bamberg [cancelled by Sophia due to illness]
  • Dec/11/2013
    • user training and live demonstration of MoNa in Erlangen
  • Dec/05/2013
    • user training and live demonstration of MoNa in Nuremberg
  • Nov/22/2013
    • user training of volunteers and live demonstration of MoNa at Sophia in Bamberg
  • Oct/30/2013
    • MoNa goes online. MoNa is an acronym of  "mobility and neighbourhood"  with the goal to improve mobility and social contacts of seniors in the neighbourhood. It is still a prototype but we are working hard to add new functionalities.
  • Sep/31/2013
  • Jul/17/2013
    • Konsortialtreffen in Bamberg, Live-Demonstration Mobility plattform, presentation(1.8 MB, 14 pages)
  • May/22/2013
    • Assistive Technology to Support the Mobility of Senior Citizens: Overcoming Mobility Barriers and Establishing Mobility Chains by Social Collaboration, KI-Künstliche Intelligenz, Vol. 27, No. 3, Springer. 2013, paper(514.9 KB, 7 pages)
  • May/2013
    • Survey 'mobility at seniority ' of subproject 'Assistance technologies' 
      • the survey has been conducted to find out more about activities of seniors, barriers they struggle with and help they need of seniors living in Bamberg, Erlangen, and Nuremberg, survey: mobility at seniority(132.6 KB), (in German)
  • Apr/11/2013
    • General Assembly European Federation for Living, April 10-12 2013,  Joseph-Stiftung Bamberg. Lecture: Living and Mobility- technological perspectives, Prof. Dr. Ute Schmid, University Bamberg
  • Mar/20/2013
    • Konsortialtreffen at WBG Nuremberg in Nuremberg
  • Feb/28/2013
    • Kick-off Technologie Allianz Oberfranken (TAO) in Coburg. TAO is a co-operation between University of Bamberg, University of Bayreuth, Hochschule Coburg, and University of Applied Science Hof. We presented our project "EMN-Moves" to a variety of people from politics (like Staatsminister Dr. Wolfgang Heubisch) and buisness
  • Dec/19/2012
    • Bamberg,  2nd Workshop - Survey and technical requirements, presentation(12.2 MB), protocol(29.3 KB)
  • Dec/15/2012
  • Dec/12/2012
    • Bamberg, Konsortialtreffen
  • Nov/12/2012
  • Nov/05/2012,
  • Oct/23/2012
  • Oct/17/2012
    • meeting with sociologists of University of Bamberg, exchange of experience with their project 'online dating'
  • Sep/25/2012
    • meeting with SOPHIA in Bamberg, topic: mobility assistance
  • Aug/27 - Aug/30/2012
    • Michael Munz, Matchmaking - How similar is what I want to what I get?. SAMAI2012, 1st International Workshop on Similarity and Analogy-based Methods in AI, Co-located with the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Montpellier, France, 2012
  • Jul/05/2012
    • GEWOBAU, Konsortialtreffen
  • Jun/2012
    • Ute Schmid. Match-Making -- with or without ontologies?. Dagstuhl Seminar 12221, Cognitive Approaches for the Semantic Web, organized by Dedre Gentner, Frank van Harmelen, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, and Kai-Uwe Kühnberger (28.5.-1.6. 2012), 2012
  • May/27/2012
    • meeting with volunteers & SOPHIA employees for requirement anaylsis
  • May/21/2012
  • May/14/2012
    • meeting with 'Seniorenbeauftragten' of Nuremberg in Erlangen
  • May/02/2012
    • meeting with 'Seniorenbeauftragte' of Nuremberg and WBG
  • Apr/17/2012
    • meeting with 'Seniorenbeauftragte' of Bamberg
  • Apr/04/2012
    • meeting with 'Seniorenbeauftragte' of Erlangen
  • Mar/15/2012
    • requirement analysis with GEWOBAU in Erlangen
  • Feb/15/2012
    • 1st project report
  • Feb/09/2012
    • WBG Nürnberg, Konsortialtreffen
    • State of the art of matchmaking, presentation, Martin Sticht
  • Feb/03/2012
    • Assistenzsystem-Wiki
    • GUI Prototyp
  • Jan/19/2012
    • GEWOBAU, Workshop Wohnungsbauunternehmen
  • Nov/30/2011
    • Workshop 'mobility assistance'
  • Nov/21/2011
    • SOPHIA Zentrale, Konsortialtreffen

papers at a glance

Prototype

An early prototype is available at: Matchmaking. Note, a login is currently required to use the matchmaking service

Advised Theses

Matthias Düsel:  Semantisches Matching von Freizeitaktivit?ten mittels Wikipedia-basierter Kategorisierung (MA AI) --  Semantic matching of leisure activities by Wikipedia based categorisation, December 2013, thesis(565.9 KB, 46 pages)

Jürgen Gegenfurtner:Entwurf und Umsetzung einer Nutzerführung für das Finden von Mobilit?tspartnerschaften basierend auf Aktivit?ts-Matching sowie r?umlichen, zeitlichen und individuellen Constraints (BA WI), December 2012

Lukas Berle:Matchmaking for semi-formal data based on self-extending ontologies -- An application to mobility support for elderly people (BA WI), September 2012, thesis(3.2 MB, 43 pages), presentation(2.0 MB, 17 pages)

Projekt members

Former project members