AmIE: An Ambient Intelligent Environment for Assisted Living (original) (raw)

A context-aware environment for independent living elders1

Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA), 2014 Asia-Pacific, 2014

Elder care poses an increasingly demanding issue that every aging society has to address. The notion of Ambient Assisted Living aims to solve the issue by promoting the idea of ageing at home through innovative ICT technology. The core technology relies on the real-time identification of occupant's status and prompt notification to supporting service providers before pertinent measures can be taken. This study proposes an enabling solution that converts general household setting into a context-aware environment geared for elder care: normal activities are automatically updated at Facebook news feed, and alerting conditions are instantly notified to emergency contact by Google Cloud Messages. I.

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: A survey

Digital Communications and Networks, 2015

The demographic change towards an ageing population is introducing significant impact and drastic challenge to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for longer time. The term of Ambient Assist Living (AAL) becomes a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to senior people with impairment. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL.

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.

RUDO: A Home Ambient Intelligence System for Blind People

Sensors, 2017

The article introduces an ambient intelligence system for blind people which besides providing assistance in home environment also helps with various situations and roles in which blind people may find themselves involved. RUDO, the designed system, comprises several modules that mainly support or ensure recognition of approaching people, alerting to other household members' movement in the flat, work on a computer, supervision of (sighted) children, cooperation of a sighted and a blind person (e.g., when studying), control of heating and zonal regulation by a blind person. It has a unified user interface that gives the blind person access to individual functions. The interface for blind people offers assistance with work on a computer, including writing in Braille on a regular keyboard and specialized work in informatics and electronics (e.g., programming). RUDO can complement the standard aids used by blind people at home, it increases their independence and creates conditions that allow them to become fully involved. RUDO also supports blind people sharing a home with sighted people, which contributes to their feeling of security and greater inclusion in society. RUDO has been implemented in a household for two years, which allows an evaluation of its use in practice.

Context-aware environments for independent living

Proceedings of ERA 2004, …, 2004

The range of pervasive computing technology available for use in healthcare continues to evolve, allowing for an increasing variety of wireless sensors, devices, and actuators to be cost effectively deployed in smart, context-aware environments. One area that is of compelling interest for the application of this technology is independent living of the elderly. An independent living environment needs to support an individual's healthcare needs and activities of daily living (ADL), while extending social interaction, environment control, and information flow to care giver and family communities. This must be done without compromising an individual's medical care, safety, privacy, or security and should allow an individual to maintain maximal independence. Continuing variations in cognitive and physical capability must also be considered. Current context-aware pervasive computing environments only partially address these requirements. This paper surveys current pervasive computing research activities in this area and introduces research on an architecture for a pervasive computing infrastructure to realise independent living environments. The infrastructure will allow contextsensitive adaptive interfaces to assist individuals with tasks and provide alternate modes of interaction with common devices such as phones, microwaves, and televisions. It also considers the community policies that define what access rights, degree of control, and interactions, caregivers, friends, and family have with the environment in normal and extraordinary situations. These policies will influence the context-aware behaviour of the independent living environment and can be used to shape interface adaptation, trigger social or care specific interactions, guide daily tasks, and support health-care or other sophisticated independent-living applications.

Towards an intelligent and supportive environment for people with physical or cognitive restrictions

Proceedings of the …, 2009

AmbienNet environment has been developed with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of accessible intelligent environments designed to support people with disabilities and older persons living independently. Its main purpose is to examine in depth the advantages and disadvantages of pervasive supporting systems based on the paradigm of Ambient Intelligence for people with sensory, physical or cognitive limitations. Hence diverse supporting technologies and applications have been designed in order to test their accessibility, ease of use and validity. This paper presents the architecture of AmbienNet intelligent environment and an intelligent application to support indoors navigation for smart wheelchairs designed for validation purposes.

Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living: Ambient Communication and Indoor Positioning

2015

In all industrialised countries, the population is aging rapidly as the average life expectancy continues to rise and the number of younger age groups grows smaller. Hence, due to economical and practical reasons, the elders of the near future will likely live longer in their own apartments, particularly because institutionalization is significantly expensive and there is not room for the entire elderly population in currently existing nursing homes. Even more important, nearly all people would choose to live independently as long as possible before moving into an assisted-living facility. A longer period of independent living for elders can be enabled by technical solutions. In this work, two technology areas for assisted living are studied. First, the prevention of feelings of loneliness in elders living alone is studied, and a solution for social inclusion and remote presence is presented. The results of long-lasting field trials are presented and analysed. Secondly, as information regarding the location of the inhabitant in the apartment can be used to provide several assistive services, indoor positioning systems are also studied in this work. Several technologies for indoor positioning are presented and compared. Furthermore, a new system based on capacitive measurement and the results of testing of the system are introduced. Technologies and systems developed here have been implemented into actual systems, and real end users have tested them over long periods of time. Thus, these technologies can be developed into commercial products with reasonable effort. Moreover, in this work it has been proven that the systems developed can actually be used to support the independent living of elders.