About
EUFACETS – EU Face Advanced Communication for Elders Treasuring in Society
The project EUFACETS aims to develop an app for smartphones, tablets, and computers that establishes a family-oriented social network based on the concept of visage. This app enables the exchange of pictures and messages between the elderly and their extended families, fostering connections across generations.
The app allows users to digitize analog pictures and encourages the elderly to share stories associated with these pictures. It puts emphasis on semantic connections based on personal narratives and emotions, moving beyond the mere formality of connections typical of contemporary, face-based social network services.
Impact and Benefit
EUFACETS is meant to benefit first those generations that were mostly excluded from the currently existing social networks because of the digital divide. But the project is not about “bridging the digital divide”; on the opposite: the digital divide exists, but EUFACETS plans to bridge it the other way around. It does not want to digitalise the memory of the elders, but it wants to humanise the memory of the young thanks to the elders and the digital. It aims to treasure the memory, the stories and, above all, the sensibility of those who were young before the advent of the web to create a connection across the generations.
Social Innovation
EUFACETS is a social innovation that aims to establish new and meaningful relations between the elders and their family and friends, in the context of Ageing Europe. To do so, it promotes a new idea of connection and a new way of using digital technologies to create virtual communities based on shared values, narratives and emotions, demonstrating that the new proposed visage-centred social network can be useful to reconnect elders with their distant relatives, friends and acquaintances, as well as with the pre-digital past of their visage.
In the long term, EUFACETS aspires to influence existing face-based digital social networks by offering a different approach to connecting people and creating communities. We prioritize human intelligence, personal memory, and the emotional aspect of connections, ultimately creating a storybook of visages rather than a mere deposit of faces.
