## 2 The Smart Angel Project  
Smart Angel is a two-year project, funded by the Italian Liguria region through the \"Programma Attuativo Regionale del Fondo Aree Sottoutilizzate della Regione Liguria 2007-2013 (PAR-FAS)\". The project aims at supporting urban mobility and everyday life of people with medium-mild intellectual impairments, giving them the possibility to gain a better control over their own lives while, at the same time, reassuring caregivers. The project is carried out by a consortium involving associations of cognitive impaired, scientific partners as well as small and medium enterprises. Smart Angel aims at creating a network involving families, caregivers, experts and tutors, as well as the final users and their friends, built on a mobile cloud based system to support both everyday living and urban mobility of people with medium-mild intellectual disabilities, with particular attention to the Down syndrome. As such, the system can be seen as a tool to empower its users to be more independent and therefore increasing their possibility to have an active role in their life and an active participation to the community.  
Using Smart Angel, people with intellectual disabilities are supported in their daily activities. For example, if going to swimming pool at a certain time of the day is planned in a user's agenda, the system will remind him when it is time to start getting ready, what items will be needed in the swimming bag, at what time he has to leave the house, _etc._ Furthermore, if the user stops along the way for a long time, a reminder will warn him that he might be late; or if he turns the wrong way the system will automatically send him a message telling him that the pool is the other way. However, the user is always free to make his own decisions and avoid following the system's suggestions. The tutor, in his remote position, will see the user's position all the time and can always decide to intervene if he feels that it is needed. The planning of the daily agenda, as well as all the geographical information about the pool's location and the way to get to it are configured by the tutor optionally with the final user himself.  
Smart Angel is based on the \"learning from experience\" approach, which, due to the characteristics of the target users, we believe is more effective than those based on abstract thinking and conceptualization are. As an example, the RECALL project [15] aims to combine location-based services with games based learning to promote route learning by means of rehearsing, reflecting and reinforcing the routes. The project having very similar aims is based on very different underlying theoretical principles. RECALL is aimed at people with various impairments (learning disabilities, sensory impairments, _etc._) that are different or milder than those considered by Smart Angel, and it makes extensive use of maps while in our project maps are not used for the end users since they require conceptualization and abstraction abilities.  
In Italy, the project \"Casa Piu\" [16] is a project that has some similarities with Smart Angel, aiming at the same target audience of intellectually disabled people, and it addresses very well everyday living support within the house, but it is not so supportive with respect to town mobility.  
The Smart Angel system is based on an experimented didactic approach that the user association involved in the project (CEPIM: Centro Italiano Persone Down ONLUS, a non profit social organization for people with the Down syndrome) has traditionally been using for decades. Smart Angel has the objective to support the tutor's work by minimizing the need of personal intervention, which is of extreme importance due to the costs and the limited number of available tutors.