Toilet4me Project Description

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Aim:

The Toilet4me project addressed older people and the needs they have when using a toilet outside home in semi-public environments (e.g. toilets located in community centres, shopping malls, museums, theatres, hotels). The vision of Toilet4me was to develop and provide an ICT-enhanced toilet system which is able to adapt itself to the individual needs and preferences of the older person currently using the toilet.

Approach:

Core is a motorised toilet able to support the sitting and the stand-to-sit and sit-to-stand transition with the possibility to re-use adjustment data from preferences at home. Some partners have already participated in the previous iToilet AAL project (2016-2018) which has developed ICT-enhanced toilet systems for older persons who are living at home.

Based on the very good results and on the idea of supporting older persons also outside home, the idea of extending the application area towards semi-public settings has occurred. This area is very attractive as availability of suitable toilets will empower and support older persons to leave home and to actively participate in the society. It additionally will open up new market areas with important customers, e.g. hotels offering state of the art accessible and adaptable hotel rooms as USP which will bring clear RoI.

Toilet4me explored the new application area to learn more about market, customer, user-related and technological issues before setting up a focussed larger RTD project. The composition of the consortium allowed to carry out the study and based on promising results to thoroughly prepare a following large AAL innovation project which was accepted for funding. The new project T4ME2 has started in March 2020.

Expected benefits:

• Older persons (primary end users):
  • Direct benefit: improved body stability (adapting to optimal sitting height), supporting sitting-down and standing-up transition, improved safety.
  • Indirect benefit: motivation / empowerment to leave home and participate in social and active life (knowing that suitable toilets are provided)
• For secondary users (carers): reduced workload, less demanding
• For tertiary users (institutions, hotels, ...): offering better service for community, enter important emerging market (accessible tourism)

The project Toilet4me is co-funded by the European Commission and the National Authorities and R&D programmes in Austria, The Netherlands, Portugal and Romania in the framework of the AAL Joint Programme (project number AAL-2018-5-101-SCP) .