In today’s society, the average age of the population is constantly increasing, together with the need to assist them through specific social services. Information technologies can be exploited to help monitoring pathologies in long-term care programs and can offer very useful tools to empower social inclusion and independent living. However, such tools should be carefully designed in order to be easily accepted by that part of population that is not familiar with digital technologies. Focusing on the challenge of providing ICT services through easier forms of interaction, this paper proposes a new e-service provisioning model that adopts a “hidden” computer as a flexible platform to provide social e-services. It adopts the TV as the most familiar interface for info-marginalized audiences, with a set of input/output devices to ease the interaction. Two platforms, specifically a TV box and an all-in-one touchscreen, have been implemented and evaluated with older adults, retrieving their opinions and feedback. Results show that the proposed solutions help to decrease the usual reluctance of seniors with respect to ICT, thanks to more familiar and easier forms of interaction able to reduce the digital gap toward new communications paradigm.

在当今的社会中，人口的平均年龄不断增长，并且需要通过特定的社会服务来帮助他们。可以利用信息技术来帮助监视长期护理计划中的疾病，并可以提供非常有用的工具来增强社会包容性和独立生活。但是，应精心设计此类工具，以使不熟悉数字技术的那部分人容易接受。着眼于通过更轻松的交互形式提供ICT服务的挑战，本文提出了一种新的电子服务提供模型，该模型采用“隐藏”计算机作为提供社会电子服务的灵活平台。它采用电视作为边缘化信息受众最熟悉的界面，并带有一组输入/输出设备以简化交互。已针对老年人实施并评估了两个平台，特别是电视盒和多合一触摸屏，以获取他们的意见和反馈。结果表明，所提出的解决方案有助于减少老年人对ICT的通常不愿，这要归功于更熟悉和更轻松的互动形式，能够减少与新通信范式之间的数字鸿沟。