Within the first year of the NETCARITY project the actual needs and preferences of older adults with respect to the design of domestic technologies have been studied, with the conduction of focus groups, workshops, questionnaires and interviews, prototype testing and contextual inquiries. The three main areas of interest were the approach used to establish a strong stakeholders' network that will provide a good basis to implement AAL products and services, the use of scenarios and personas to elicit user requirements and the use of mock-up experiments to let the users' evaluation feedback and design ideas impact on the iterative design of relevant services and interaction interfaces. The research has been carried out at two pilot-sides: Trento located in Italy and Eindhoven located in the Netherlands. Next step in the project is to perform longitudinal evaluation studies with prototypes installed in real homes to analyse the impact of the developed technology on the routines of daily living.