The Space of Movement between Real and Virtual: The Purpose of a Pilot Project

To realize physical activities guidelines for ageing people, the promotion of walking groups seems to be an effective way. Walking groups, supported by wearable and portable technologies, seems to be a good opportunity to merge social, educational, and physical promotion in elderly. The SCC Innovation Hub & Living Lab Network project and the Walk&Talky service move in this direction, in order to better identify the effective outcome to ameliorate technology’s purpose and consequently ageing people participation. In particular, Walk&Talky is a service that supports walking leaders and walking groups participants by keeping track of the performed physical activity and monitoring their fatigue status while walking. Through this tool, we aim at easing the psychological burden of constantly checking the adequateness of physical exercise (which is left to the automatic tools, e.g., wearable sensors), allowing the elderly to enjoy the social aspects of the walking group activities. This should allow them to put sociability and relationships as the core of the activities.