scholarly journals GATEWAY ARCHITECTURES FOR HOME CARE APPLICATIONS USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

2011 ◽  
pp. 367-372
Author(s):  
Axel Sikora ◽  
Nathan Braun ◽  
Steffen Jaeckel ◽  
Daniel Jaeckle
Keyword(s):  
Home Care ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Network Size ◽  
Energy Budgets ◽  
Integrated Network ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Communication Flow

Home Care Applications and Ambient Assisted Living become increasingly attractive. This is caused as well by market pull, as the number of elderly people grows monotonously in highly-developed countries, as well as by technology push, as technological advances and attractive products pave the way to economically advantageous offerings. However, a significant number of challenges remain for real-life applications. Those include the lack of sufficiently standardized and interoperable solutions and thus, the necessity of gateways for integrated solutions, restrictions of the energy budgets, and scalability of solutions with regard to cost and network size. This paper presents the experience from the inCASA project (Integrated Network for Completely Assisted Senior Citizen’s Autonomy), where architectures for heterogeneous physical and logical communication flow are examined.

scholarly journals Ambient Assisted Living as Support for Aging in Place: Quantitative Users’ Acceptance Study on Ultrasonic Whistles (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Biermann ◽  
Julia Offermann-van Heek ◽  
Simon Himmel ◽  
Martina Ziefle
Keyword(s):  
Home Care ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Emergency Service ◽  
Aging In Place ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Home Automation ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Care Needs

BACKGROUND Given the fact of an aging society, new supply measures and living concepts are needed, especially as health impairments along with care dependency increase with age. As many elderly people wish to stay at home for as long as possible, ambient assisted living (AAL) represents a support for aging in place. OBJECTIVE AAL combines medical and care technology within living environments and is, therefore, a promising approach to cope with demographic change in terms of fast-growing care needs and fewer skilled workers. Ultrasonic whistles represent one innovative technical possibility for such supportive housing solutions. Central fields of application are home automation, emergency service, and positioning. As AAL technologies affect sensitive areas of life, it is of great interest under which conditions they are accepted or rejected, taking individual user requirements into account. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate users’ perception and evaluation of ultrasonic whistles. METHODS In this study, we examined the acceptance of ultrasonic whistles in home care by function and room using a Web-based questionnaire. Besides an evaluation of the overall usefulness, we focused on the intention to use ultrasonic whistles; 270 participants assessed home automation, emergency service, and positioning as specific functions of ultrasonic whistles. Furthermore, bathroom, bedroom, and living room were evaluated as specific usage locations (rooms). With regard to the user’s perspective, the focus was set on age and attitudes toward aging of care receivers. RESULTS This study revealed a significant influence of function (F2,269=60.444; P<.001), room (F2,269=41.388; P<.001), and the interaction of function and room (F4,269=8.701; P<.001) on the acceptance of ultrasonic whistles. The use of emergency services within the bathroom represented the most accepted alternative, whereas positioning within the living room received the comparably lowest evaluations. Although user diversity played a minor role for acceptance overall, the assessment of single applications differed among user groups, particularly with regard to age differences (F20,500=1.988; P<.01) in the evaluation of specific installation options such as automated doors. CONCLUSIONS The study revealed profound insights into the user-centered assessment of ultrasonic whistles in home care and discovered function and room as influencing acceptance parameters. Concerning user characteristics, age, and attitude toward aging partly affected these evaluations, forming the basis for and showing the importance of further investigations in this context.

scholarly journals Using Graphs of Queues and Genetic Algorithms to Fast Approximate Crowd Simulations

Proceedings ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (19) ◽  
pp. 1216
Author(s):  
Ismael Sagredo-Olivenza ◽  
Marlon Cárdenas-Bonett ◽  
Jorge Gómez-Sanz ◽  
Juan Pavón
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Algorithms ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Realistic Model ◽  
Crowd Simulation ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Crowd Simulations ◽  
Sufficient Degree ◽  
Simulation Task

The use of Crowd Simulation for re-enacting different real life scenarios has been studied in the literature. In this field of research, the interplay between ambient assisted living solutions and the behavior of pedestrians in large installations is highly relevant. However, when designing these simulations, the necessary simplifications may result in different ranges of accuracy. The more realistic the simulation task is, the more complex and computational expensive it becomes. We present an approach towards a reasonable trade-off: given a complex and computational expensive crowd simulation, how to produce fast crowd simulations whose results approximate the results of the detailed and more realistic model. These faster simulations can be used to forecast the outcome of several scenarios, enabling the use of simulations in decision-making methods. This work contributes with a simplified faster simulation model that uses a graph of queues for modeling an environment where a set of agents will navigate. This model is configured using Genetic Algorithms (GA) applied to data obtained from complex 3D crowd simulations. This is illustrated with a proof-of-concept scenario where a 3D simulation of one floor of a faculty building, with its corresponding students, is re-enacted in the network of queues version. The success criteria are achieving a similar total number of people in particular floor areas along the simulation in both the simplified simulation and the original one. The experiments confirm that this approach approximates the number of people in each area with a sufficient degree of fidelity with respect to the results that are obtained by a more complex 3D simulator.

Conceptual Design of a Mechatronic System for Supporting Basic Quality of Life of Bedridden Elderly People

2014 ◽  
Vol 658 ◽  
pp. 483-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Silva ◽  
José Machado ◽  
Vitor Carvalho ◽  
Filomena Soares ◽  
Demétrio Matos ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Elderly People ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Mechatronic System ◽  
Aged People ◽  
Rehabilitation Centers

Ambient Assisted Living is an important subject to be explored and developed, especially in developed countries, due to the increasing number of aged people. In this context the development of mechatronic support systems for bedridden elderly people (BEP) living in their homes is essential in order to support independence, autonomy and improve their quality of life. Some basic tasks as eating, taking a bath and/or hygiene cares become difficult to execute, regarding that often the main caregiver is the other element of the aged couple (husband or wife). This paper presents the conceptual design of a mechanical system especially devoted to assist the caregiver in the handling and repositioning of the BEP. Issues as reducing the number of caregivers, to only one, and reducing the system's handling complexity (because most of the time it will be used by an aged person) are considered. The expertise obtained from the visits to rehabilitation centers and hospitals, and from working meetings, are considered in the development of the proposed mechatronic system.

scholarly journals Integrating an Ambient Assisted Living monitoring system into clinical decision-making in home care: An embedded case study

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Lussier ◽  
M. Couture ◽  
M. Moreau ◽  
C. Laliberté ◽  
S. Giroux ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Home Care ◽  
Monitoring System ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Clinical Decision Making ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Clinical Decision ◽  
Embedded Case Study

scholarly journals Usability Heuristic Evaluation in AAL Ecosystems

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Romeiro ◽  
Pedro Araújo
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Life Quality ◽  
User Interaction ◽  
Evaluation Process ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Healthcare Services ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
End User

In the past few  years there has been a significant growth of the elderly population   in both developing and developed countries. This event provided new economic, technical and demographic challenges to current societies in several areas and services. Among them the healthcare services can be highlighted, due to its impact in people daily lives. As a natural response an effort has been made by both the scientific and industrial community to develop alternatives, which could mitigate the current healthcare services bottlenecks and provide means in aiding and improve the end-user life quality. Through a combination of information and communication technologies specialized ecosystems have been developed, however multiple challenges arose, which compromise their adoption and acceptance among the main stakeholders, such as their autonomy, robustness, security, integration, human-computer interactions and usability. As consequence an effort has been made to deal with the technical related bottlenecks, which shifted the development process focus from the end-user to the ecosystems technological impairments. Despite there being user related issues, such as usability, which still remains to be addressed. Therefore this article focuses over the ecosystem’s usability through the analysis of the process used to check the ecosystem’s compliance level with the usability guidelines from Jakob Nielsen and Shneiderman; and the identification of the quantifiable parameters for each principle that could aid in the heuristics evaluation process by maximizing its objectivity improve its overall accuracy. Keywords: Usability, Ambient assisted living, User interaction, Older people, Heuristics analysis

scholarly journals Enhancing the Ambient Assisted Living Capabilities with a Mobile Robot

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Gomez-Donoso ◽  
Félix Escalona ◽  
Francisco Miguel Rivas ◽  
Jose Maria Cañas ◽  
Miguel Cazorla
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Mobile Robot ◽  
Elderly People ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Real Life

Ambient assisted living (AAL) environments are currently a key focus of interest as an option to assist and monitor disabled and elderly people. These systems can improve their quality of life and personal autonomy by detecting events such as entering potentially dangerous areas, potential fall events, or extended stays in the same place. Nonetheless, there are areas that remain outside the scope of AAL systems due to the placement of cameras. There also exist sources of danger in the scope of the camera that the AAL system cannot detect. These sources of danger are relatively small in size, occluded, or nonstatic. To solve this problem, we propose the inclusion of a robot which maps such uncovered areas looking for new potentially dangerous areas that go unnoticed by the AAL. The robot then sends this information to the AAL system in order to improve its performance. Experimentation in real-life scenarios successfully validates our approach.

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