Framework for an Intelligent Affect Aware Smart Home Environment for Elderly People (original) (raw)

Towards an affective aware home

… Management in the Heart of the …, 2009

The nowadays smart homes run predefined rules, but the user's desired behaviour for a smart home varies, as his/her needs change over time.

Framework for A Personalized Intelligent Assistant to Elderly People for Activities of Daily Living

International Journal of Recent Trends in Human Computer Interaction (IJHCI), 2019

The increasing population of elderly people is associated with the need to meet their increasing requirements and to provide solutions that can improve their quality of life in a smart home. In addition to fear and anxiety towards interfacing with systems; cognitive disabilities, weakened memory, disorganized behavior and even physical limitations are some of the problems that elderly people tend to face with increasing age. The essence of providing technology-based solutions to address these needs of elderly people and to create smart and assisted living spaces for the elderly; lies in developing systems that can adapt by addressing their diversity and can augment their performances in the context of their day to day goals. Therefore, this work proposes a framework for development of a Personalized Intelligent Assistant to help elderly people perform Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) in a smart and connected Internet of Things (IoT) based environment. This Personalized Intelligent Assistant can analyze different tasks performed by the user and recommend activities by considering their daily routine, current affective state and the underlining user experience. To uphold the efficacy of this proposed framework, it has been tested on a couple of datasets for modelling an "average user" and a "specific user" respectively. The results presented show that the model achieves a performance accuracy of 73.12% when modelling a "specific user", which is considerably higher than its performance while modelling an "average user", this upholds the relevance for development and implementation of this proposed framework.

Dynamically Adapting the Environment for Elderly People Through Smartwatch-Based Mood Detection

2018

The ageing population and age-related diseases are some of the most urgent challenges in healthcare. This leads to an increasing demand in innovative solutions to afford a healthy and safe lifestyle to the elderly. Towards this goal, the City4Age project, funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission, focuses on IoT-based personal data capture, supporting smart cities to empower social/health services. This paper describes the combination of the smartwatch-based Happimeter with City4Age data capture technology. Through measuring the mood of the wearer of the smartwatch, a signal is transmitted to the Philips Hue platform, enabling mood-controlled lighting. Philips Hue allows the wireless remote control of energy-efficient LED light bulbs. Thus, measuring the mood through the Happimeter, the living environment for elderly people can be dynamically adapted. We anticipate that by changing colors and brightness of light bulbs using the Philips Hue platform, their quali...

Probabilistic elderly person’s mood analysis based on its activities of daily living using smart facilities

Pattern Analysis and Applications

The world's population is aging, and eldercare services that use smart facilities such as smart homes are widely common in societies now. With the aid of smart facilities, the present study aimed at understanding an elder's moods based on the person's activities of daily living (ADLs). With this end in view, an explainable probabilistic graphical modeling approach, applying the Bayesian network (BN), was proposed. The proposed BN-based model was capable of defining the relationship between the elder's ADLs and moods in three different levels: Activity-based Feature (AbF), Category of Activity (CoA), and the mood state. The model also allowed us to explain the transformations among the different levels/nodes on the defined BNs. A framework featured with smart facilities, including a smart home, a smartphone, and a wristband, was utilized to assess the model. The smart home was an elderly woman's house, equipped with a set of binary-based sensors. For about five months, the ADLs' data have been recorded through daily behavioral-based information, registered by experts using a defined questionnaire. The obtained results proved that the proposed BN-based model of the current study could promisingly estimate the elder's moods and CoA states. Moreover, in contrast to the machine learning techniques that behave like a black box, the effect of each feature from the lower levels to the higher levels of information of the BNs can be traced. Implications of the findings for future diagnosis and treatment of the elderly are considered.

Affect-aware behaviour modelling and control inside an intelligent environment

The evidence suggests that human actions are supported by emotional elements that complement logic inference in our decision-making processes.In this paper an exploratory study is presented providing initial evidence of the positive effects of emotional information on the ability of intelligent agents to create better models of user actions inside smart-homes. Preliminary results suggest that an agent incorporating valence-based emotional data into its input array can model user behaviour in a more accurate way than agents using no emotion-based data or raw data based on physiological changes. [This version of the paper is a pre-publication version with slightly more data and text]

The use of Emotional Design Techniques in user oriented design of interfaces within a smart house environment: Case study

Technology and Disability, 2006

IBV is working in the emerging area of Emotional Engineering with application in the development of technology for the user wellness. A first prospective analysis is made in the field of smart house technologies for elderly people focused on clarifying the role of emotions in the interaction user-environment mediated by technology. The study was undertaken with elderly people within the age segment from 40 to 75 years old with no pathology that could affect cognitive processes. As a result, a clear emotional dimension is identified as design barrier that makes smart house environments be understood far from redeeming lack of abilities due to ageing. This paper also highlights the challenge of developing methodological approaches customized for the field of emotional design in interactive products.

A User-Centred Well-Being Home for the Elderly

Applied Sciences, 2018

Every single instant a person generates a large amount of information that somehow is lost. This information can assume a large diversity of means, such as an oral word, a sneeze, an increase in heartbeat or even facial expressions. We present a model which promotes the well-being of the elderly in their homes. The general idea behind the model is that every single experience may mean something, and therefore may be recorded, measured and even have adequate responses. There is no device that provides a more natural interaction than a human body and every one of us, sends and receives useful information, which sometimes gets lost. Trends show that the future will be filled with pervasive IoT devices, present in most aspects of human life's. In this we focus on which aspects are more important for the well-being of a person and which devices, technologies and interactions may be used to collect data directly from users and measure their physiological and emotional responses. Even though not all the technologies presented in this article are yet mainstream, they have been evolving very rapidly and evidence makes us believe that the efficiency of this approach will be closely related to their advances.

A study of the state of the art of Affective Computing in Ambient Intelligence environments

This paper reviews the research that is been made integrating two emerging areas: Affective Computing (AC) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI). A deep review about the state of the art integrating both research areas is explained. Then, a practical example is provided to check the viability of AC thinking in AmI environments, pointing out the difficulties this process has. Finally, some actual and future trends are mentioned in order to make clearer topics related to AC in AmI environments.