BMBF-Project "EMN Moves": Match-Making

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

Ute Schmid, Martin Sticht

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