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Many developed countries such as Japan now face increasingly aged populations, and the budget for social security is increasing. In Japan in particular, over 89.8% of seniors are healthy enough not to need care and retain a strong desire to work. Unfortunately, most employers regard senior citizens as unreliable workers.
Some companies have recently introduced worksharing programs that employ retired seniors on a part-time basis. However, these programs need to be more flexible to consider risks such as sudden illness.
Thus, we propose a “Mosaic-type work” system in which a single “virtual worker” is synthesized from individual work resources in order to supply an autonomous and stable labor force. To achieve this synthesis, seamless information sharing among senior workers is essential. The system can deal with risks and reduce the burdens of senior people, but many seniors have difficulty using information and communication technologies (ICTs). Therefore, in order to assist seniors, a simple interface should be implemented.
“Senior Cloud”is an ICT platform for hyper-aged society in Japan to innovate a novel social model that exploits the power of senior citizens. It consists of interface technologies that collect and transfer knowledge of senior citizens and a cloud computing platform that supports mosaic-type work system in which virtualizes and combines elderly human resources to form a skillful single “virtual worker”.
This project aims to develop an ICT platform called the “Senior Cloud” for our hyper-aged society to innovate a novel social model that exploits the power of senior citizens. It consists of interface technologies that collect and transfer knowledge of senior citizens and a cloud computing platform that structuralizes the knowledge so that it is available for various purposes.
“Senior Cloud” enhances the social involvement and quality of life of the elderly. In parallel, the knowledge and experiences of the elderly are given back to promote the society. Applications will include healthcare and cognitive function support and community formation support, which will improve the quality of life of the elderly, as well as job assistance and creating a knowledge library, which will assist society by benefiting from their knowledge and experiences.
For example, the ICT platform helps transfer skills from highly-experienced senior workers, who have retired due to physical problems, to younger workers in primary industries. The crowdsourcing system finds an appropriate “instructor” based on skill-matching algorithms and provides real-time assistance through telecommunication technologies. The knowledge library system builds a “wisdom-of-crowds” database based on knowledge-extraction technologies from heterogeneous data sources.
A senior-friendly ICT platform is being developed based on the University of Tokyo’s life-logging and Mixed Reality technologies, IBM’s social computing and natural language processing technologies. From the initial stage of the research and development, we are involving senior citizens in local communities through interviews and experiments to assess potential impacts and problems of technologies under development, to back up the practical effectiveness of “Senior Cloud”.
