A survey on ambient-assisted living tools for older adults (original) (raw)
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Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019
Several social and technical trends support the elderly's desire to live independently in their preferred environment, despite their increasing medical needs, and enhance their quality of life at home. Ambientassisted living (AAL) has the capabilities to support the elderly and to decrease their dependency on formal or informal caregivers. We provide a review of the technological challenges that were identified as inhibiting factors in the past decade and then present recent technological advances, e.g., cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things. We also fill the gap in the current literature in regard to specific AAL solutions and propose fourthgeneration AAL technology design. We find that most informal caregivers are family members who are medically untrained and that the use of advanced analytical processes on AAL-generated data could significantly increase symptom identification. We also present the implications and remaining challenges along with recommendations for future research.
A survey of Ambient Assisted Living systems: challenges and opportunities
—As the research in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) matures, we expect that data generated from AAL IoT devices will benefit from analysis by well established machine learning techniques. There is also potential that new research in ML and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used on data generated from the sensors used in AAL. In this paper we present a survey of the research in the related topics, identify its shortcomings and propose future work that will integrate these fields by collecting ambient sensor data and process the data by ML framework which can detect and classify activities.
Promises and challenges of ambient assisted living systems
The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and costeffective need to be sought. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. Ambient Intelligence technologies are widely developed in this domain aiming to construct safe environments around assisted peoples and help them maintain independent living. However, there are still many fundamental issues in AAL that remain open. Most of the current efforts still do not fully express the power of human being, and the importance of social connections and social activities is less noticed. Our conjecture is that such features are fundamental prerequisites towards truly effective AAL services. This paper reviews the current status of researches on AAL, discusses the promises and possible advantages of AAL, and also indicates the challenges we must meet in order to develop practical and efficient AAL systems for elderly people. In this paper, we also propose an approach to construct effective home-care system for the elderly people.
Progress in ambient assisted systems for independent living by the elderly
One of the challenges of the ageing population in many countries is the efficient delivery of health and care services, which is further complicated by the increase in neurological conditions among the elderly due to rising life expec‑ tancy. Personal care of the elderly is of concern to their relatives, in case they are alone in their homes and unforeseen circumstances occur, affecting their wellbeing. The alternative; i.e. care in nursing homes or hospitals is costly and increases further if specialized care is mobilized to patients' place of residence. Enabling technologies for independent living by the elderly such as the ambient assisted living systems (AALS) are seen as essential to enhancing care in a cost‑effective manner. In light of significant advances in telecommunication, computing and sensor miniaturization, as well as the ubiquity of mobile and connected devices embodying the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), end‑ to‑end solutions for ambient assisted living have become a reality. The premise of such applications is the continuous and most often real‑time monitoring of the environment and occupant behavior using an event‑driven intelligent system, thereby providing a facility for monitoring and assessment, and triggering assistance as and when needed. As a growing area of research, it is essential to investigate the approaches for developing AALS in literature to identify current practices and directions for future research. This paper is, therefore, aimed at a comprehensive and critical review of the frameworks and sensor systems used in various ambient assisted living systems, as well as their objec‑ tives and relationships with care and clinical systems. Findings from our work suggest that most frameworks focused on activity monitoring for assessing immediate risks, while the opportunities for integrating environmental factors for analytics and decision‑making, in particular for the long‑term care were often overlooked. The potential for wearable devices and sensors, as well as distributed storage and access (e.g. cloud) are yet to be fully appreciated. There is a distinct lack of strong supporting clinical evidence from the implemented technologies. Socio‑cultural aspects such as divergence among groups, acceptability and usability of AALS were also overlooked. Future systems need to look into the issues of privacy and cyber security.
Ambient Assisted Living for an Ageing Society: a Technological Overview
2016
The rise in the average age and the decrease in the rate of births, cause the phenomenon called population ageing, which rises a number of issues. The oncoming shortage of caregivers and the strong desire of the older adults to live in their own homes originated an increasing interest in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). AAL encompasses technical systems to support people in their daily routines. The paper focuses on the technological aspects of AAL systems describing the capabilities they require and how they are being addressed.
Ambient Assisted Living Systems: The Scope of Research and Development
Journal of Science and Technology: Issue on Information and Communications Technology, 2017
The aged population of the world is increasing by a large factor due to the availability of medical and other facilities. As the number grows rapidly, requirements of this segment of age (65+) are increasing rapidly as well as the percentage of aged persons living alone is also increasing with the same rate due to the inevitable socio-economic changes. This situation demands the solution of many problems like loneliness, chronic conditions, social interaction, transportation, day-to-day life and many more for independent living person. A large part of aged population may not be able to interact directly with new technologies. This sought some serious development towards the use of intelligent systems i.e. smart devices which helps the people with their inability to use the available as well future solutions. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is the answer to these problems. In this paper, issues related to AAL systems are studied. Study of challenges and limitations of this comparativel...
Ambient Assisted Living Technologies for Aging Well: A Scoping Review
Journal of Intelligent Systems, 2016
Ambient assisted living (AAL) technology is of considerable interest in supporting the independence and quality of life of older adults. As such, it is a core focus of the emerging field of gerontechnology, which considers how technological innovation can aid health and well-being in older age. For this scoping review, a comprehensive search of databases and key journals was conducted from January to April of 2013 in order to identify AAL technologies that have the potential to help deal with some of the challenges associated with aging. In particular, we focused on technologies that could potentially be used by people living with some degree of cognitive impairment, ranging from normal cognitive aging to mild cognitive impairment up to earlier stages of dementia. Options currently available and those still under development were both included in our search. Fifty-nine technologies were identified and are outlined here, along with a discussion of history of AAL from a gerontological...
An Ambient Assisted Living Technology Platform for Informal Carers of the Elderly
2016
Family care is the most accepted and preferred care setting for both long-term care patients and their relatives. However, many of these caregivers are elderly people themselves, and often reach the point where they also need support. Care poses a substantial burden, so often it is not the health of the patient but the overload of stress for the caregiver that results in the need for much more expensive professional care and even residential care. An ambient assisted living technology platform is developed to support both older adults and their carers to overcome the challenges of the care. The platform offers informal carers support by means of monitoring Activities of Daily Care as well as their psychological state, and will provide orientation to help them improve the care given. Monitored information will be registered by means of home-installed and personal sensor technologies based on Internet of Things (IoT), which will be as unobtrusive as possible for the house inhabitants.
Ambient intelligence in assisted living: enable elderly people to handle future interfaces
2007
Ambient Assisted Living is currently one of the important research and development areas, where accessibility, usability and learning plays a major role and where future interfaces are an important concern for applied engineering. The general goal of ambient assisted living solutions is to apply ambient intelligence technology to enable people with specific demands, e.g. handicapped or elderly, to live in their preferred environment longer. Due to the high potential of emergencies, a sound emergency assistance is required, for instance assisting elderly people with comprehensive ambient assisted living solutions sets high demands on the overall system quality and consequently on software and system engineering-user acceptance and support by various userinterfaces is an absolute necessity. In this article, we present an Assisted Living Laboratory that is used to train elderly people to handle modern interfaces for Assisted Living and evaluate the usability and suitability of these interfaces in specific situations, e.g., emergency cases.