ME3CA - Monitoring Environment Exercise and Emotion by a Cognitive Assistant (original) (raw)

ME3CA: A Cognitive Assistant for Physical Exercises that Monitors Emotions and the Environment

Sensors

Recent studies show that the elderly population has increased considerably in European society in recent years. This fact has led the European Union and many countries to propose new policies for caring services directed to this group. The current trend is to promote the care of the elderly in their own homes, thus avoiding inverting resources on residences. With this in mind, there are now new solutions in this direction, which try to make use of the continuous advances in computer science. This paper tries to advance in this area by proposing the use of a personal assistant to help older people at home while carrying out their daily activities. The proposed personal assistant is called ME3CA, and can be described as a cognitive assistant that offers users a personalised exercise plan for their rehabilitation. The system consists of a sensorisation platform along with decision-making algorithms paired with emotion detection models. ME3CA detects the users’ emotions, which are used ...

EMERALD—Exercise Monitoring Emotional Assistant

Sensors

The increase in the elderly population in today’s society entails the need for new policies to maintain an adequate level of care without excessively increasing social spending. One of the possible options is to promote home care for the elderly. In this sense, this paper introduces a personal assistant designed to help elderly people in their activities of daily living. This system, called EMERALD, is comprised of a sensing platform and different mechanisms for emotion detection and decision-making that combined produces a cognitive assistant that engages users in Active Aging. The contribution of the paper is twofold—on the one hand, the integration of low-cost sensors that among other characteristics allows for detecting the emotional state of the user at an affordable cost; on the other hand, an automatic activity suggestion module that engages the users, mainly oriented to the elderly, in a healthy lifestyle. Moreover, by continuously correcting the system using the on-line mon...

A Virtual Coach for Active Ageing Based on Sentient Computing and m-health

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

As life expectancy increases it has become more necessary to find ways to support healthy ageing. A number of active ageing initiatives are being developed nowadays to foster healthy habits in the population. This paper presents our contribution to these initiatives in the form of a conversational agent that acts as a coach for physical activities. The agent can be developed as an Android app running on smartphones and coupled with cheap widely available sport sensors in order to provide meaningful coaching. It can be employed to prepare exercise sessions, provide feedback during the sessions, and to discuss the results after the exercise. It incorporates an affective component that informs dynamic user models to produce adaptive interaction strategies.

Activity Recognition and Personalized Feedback Solution for Active and Healthy Ageing

2018

As the average lifespan increases, the care of diseases related to lifestyle and age, such as chronic and neurodegenerative ones, becomes costlier and less accessible, highlighting the need for self-management using technology. This paper proposes a pervasive system for autonomous healthy ageing, which integrates two layers of intelligence via semantic interpretation: multi-modal sensor fusion from smart devices, wearables and multimedia, and personalized spoken feedback based on context-sensing and user input. Aiming for a practical, acceptable system, the proposed architecture considers aspects of integration, security, privacy and cost. The currently implemented components include activity recognition and problem detection, complemented by end-user applications and personalized spoken feedback. The proof-of-concept implementation is evaluated both in a lab setting, for the more complex personalized feedback component, and in four real home environments, presenting efficient activity recognition, and improvement in several neuropsychological areas, such as mood, physical functional and cognitive condition of elders.

An Affective Personal Trainer for Elderly People

2019

The main goal of this paper is to try to increase the comfort and well-being of older people through the employment of some kind of automated processes that simplify daily work. So, this paper presents a prototype of an affective personal robotic trainer which, together with a non-invasive sensor, allows caregivers to monitor certain physical activities in order to improve their performance. In addition, the proposed system also takes into account how the person feels during the performance of the physical exercises and thus, determine more precisely if the exercise is appropriate or not for a specific person.

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.

A Multi-Agent System in Ambient Intelligence for the Physical Rehabilitation of Older People

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2015

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a very active topic of research that is gaining more and more attention because of its characteristics, transparency and intelligence. Older people is one of the collectives that can take advantage of the use of AmI systems because, thanks to these characteristics, AmI systems can focus on older adults' real needs so that they satisfy one of their main motivations to adapt technological innovations: perceived benefits. And, perhaps, everything related to healthcare and home care is perceived by them as both valuable and beneficial. In this paper, it is presented the Multi-Agent architecture of a healthcare AmI system to treat older people' motor impairment problems by using specific devices to control the patient's movements. In this way, the natural relationship between AmI and MAS is being widely exploited. AmI proposes the development of context-aware systems that integrate different devices to recognize the context and act accordingly. Agents provide an effective way to develop such systems since agents are reactive, proactive and exhibit an intelligent and autonomous behavior. One of the main differences of our system is that it provides therapist with support to design new therapies, to adapt them to each specific person and to control their execution instead of using a fixed set of exercises.

Towards a cognitive assistant system for elderly

2020

This paper proposes the development of a system to integrally control the activities carried out by a group of elderly people in a nursing home. The system is basically composed of a robot and an app that proposes activities, and also an individual wristband that monitors each elderly person to detect if they get bored or have fun doing the activities. As com-mented, the system also includes an app that, among other things, allows the caregiver to monitor the activities of the group or in an individualized way.GVA - Generalitat Valenciana(PROMETEO/2018/002). e FCT-Fundac¸ao para a Ci ˜ encia e Tecnolog ˆ ´ıa through the Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (A. Costa), by the Generalitat Valenciana (PROMETEO/2018/002), by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia research grant (PAID-10-19) and by the Spanish Government (RTI2018-095390-B-C31

Promotion of active ageing through interactive artificial agents in a smart environment

SN Applied Sciences, 2021

Societies in the most developed countries have witnessed a significant ageing of the population in recent decades, which increases the demand for healthcare services and caregivers. The development of technologies to help the elderly, so that they can remain active and independent for a longer time, helps to mitigate the sustainability problem posed in care services. This article follows this new trend, proposing a multi-agent system composed of a smart camera network, centralised planning agent, a virtual coach, and robotic exercise buddy, designed to promote regular physical activity habits among the elderly. The proposed system not only persuades the users to perform exercise routines, but also guides and accompanies them during exercises in order to provide effective training and engagement to the user. The different agents are combined in the system to exploit their complementary features in the quest for an effective and engaging training system. Three variants of the system, ...