Tiresia, 70 years old. Autonomy in daily life for a visually impaired elderly person

Tiresia is a man aged 70, that represents all the elderly people who spend part of their life with the difficulties caused by the decay of visual function. Social costs of visual impairment in Italy amount to about 12.069 million per year. After ophthalmologic consultation, user needs were analyzed through the IPPA instrument, which permitted us to define the intervention objectives, in particular to allow Tiresias to keep the alphabetical code as far as reading and writing are concerned, in all those activities at home and outdoors, he considered important. We studied original solutions, using both hardware (HW) and software (SW) commercial products and solutions dedicated to low vision as well. The cost analysis emerged using the SCAI methodology has highlighted the savings over the social cost by using the assistive solution proposal.