Products for people Design and technology are only accepted on a wide scale if they benefit people. For this reason Gira places people with their wishes and needs but also their different abilities at the centre of its development and design processes. This is fully in line with sustainable conduct and business, which is also mainly based on the needs of people to create a balanced relationship between economical, ecological and social responsibility. To meet this demand more effectively, the Gira Assistance project was started in 2011.

Barrier-free living spaces Gira Assistance focuses on user friendliness, operating convenience and usability. These criteria are used to gauge innovation and product quality. One important factor is that operating complex products must remain simple and intuitive for people of all ages and with different abilities – including children and the elderly. User orientation and generational friendliness are in fact of tremendous importance to enable people to live a self-determined life, even at an advanced age or with impediments caused by illness or disability. With Gira Assistance we want to show how innovative technologies and intelligent home technology can support people, make their everyday lives easier and create barrier-free living spaces – in short, improve the quality of their lives.

Using new technologies To this purpose the Gira Assistance project kicked off in 2011 with a comprehensive potential and requirement analysis. It determined the requirements of modern, generation-friendly and barrier-free living and compared these with the available building technology systems. Special attention was paid to ambient assisted living [AAL]. It was revealed that a number of products and solutions from the Gira range already did justice to these demands, such as our various systems for controlling the building technology or the Gira nurse call system with different functions that enables users to make an emergency call quickly and easily when necessary. The results of the requirement analysis also served as the basis for the development of new Gira Assistance products and solutions such as Gira Sensotec with a night programme and the further development of the Gira Sensotec LED that provide a higher level of safety and convenience – both at home and in residential care and health facilities. Barrier-free icons and symbols, visualisation of voice prompts, mobility monitoring and fall detection are also topics which we focus on closely as part of the Gira Assistance project.

Communicating innovative solutions From its inception it was always a main element of the Gira Assistance Project to communicate the possibilities that intelligent building technology opens up for ambient assisted living, generation-friendly and barrier-free living both inside and outside the company, and which solutions are available. The Gira Assistance brochure that was published in 2012 and a separate section on the website [www.partner.gira.de/assistance] first focused on this topic. In 2013 this was followed by the Gira Assistance Guide, that contained around 150 pages describing in detail the building technology system basics and possible solutions. With Gira Assistance we want to show how innovative technologies and intelligent home technology can support people, make their everyday lives easier and create barrier-free living spaces – in short, improve the quality of their lives.