The contribution describes the opportunities for providing support to elderly persons in their homes using videotelephony. Such services were tested in Frankfurt am Main as part of the Project, “Application Pilot for People with Special Needs (APPSN)” in the CEC RACE Programme.

Videotelephony offers opportunities to provide services to the home, encouraging and supporting an independent way of life and thereby reducing elderly people's need to recourse to institutional care. It is shown that services which can be provided using videotelephony in a local care scheme can potentially help maintain social competence, motivating and enabling continued participation in social activities, thereby helping to prevent decline into dependence. Other opportunities to provide help centre on informing the elderly about activities and events, providing refresher exercises between regular therapy sessions, and general assistance in coping with problems of everyday living.

Data from logging files were used to analyse the usage levels of the new services. An overview of frequency, duration and patterns of calls is given. Besides these automatically generated data, information was gathered in several surveys with participants and staff of the pilot project. The surveys were carried out as part of the evaluation of the videotelephony-based support services.

It can be shown that the implementation of a videotelephony-based social support service has a potential to assist professional carers in their difficult tasks and a potential to improve the quality of life of the elderly with special needs.