Innovative Solutions for Assistance of Active Daily Life at Home

Istvan Oniga

Description

Keywords: Ambient assisted living; Human activity monitoring; Activity recognition; e-Health; Assistive robots

H2020 challenge: Health, demographic change and wellbeing

Knowledge and skills (P: prerequisite; D: desirable, but not necessary): “general ICT knowledge” (P); “ambient assisted living (AAL); technologies” (D); “wearables for e-health” (D); “(assistive) robots” (D); “wireless data transmission technologies” (D); “data analysis and visualization techniques” (D); “Android applications development” (D); “cloud computing” (D); “web-page programming” (D).

Introduction

Population ageing is a reality today and the concern about assisting active life of elderlies through ICT solutions is a priority of European Commission and one of the Societal Challenges that will be funded in Horizon 2020 programme will be the Health, demographic change and wellbeing [1][2]. The aim of this Case Study is to analyse the existing solutions to assist elderly or sick people in their everyday activities and propose innovative ideas using newest ICT. This Case Study should include (but will be not limited to):

Study of existing solutions for (some of the) following topics [3-10]: intelligent assistive houses; assistive robots; human activity monitoring wearable devices; physiological parameters monitoring wearable devices; possibilities for data storage, visualization and analysis; pervasive and mobile applications for activity monitoring and daily life assistance.
Study about required assisted living devices, services and user acceptance of existing ones. The above study and questionnaire should improve understanding of the possible improvements of devices and services for health monitoring and to prevent, detect, treat and manage disease and how to support older persons to remain active and healthy.
Proposal of new solutions and ideas regarding the above topics. Tele-assistance, tele-medicine scenarios and mobile application development based on above studies may be developed. Characteristics of the proposed solutions should be cost-effectiveness, reliability, flexibility, applicability to realistic settings, safety and acceptability to end-users. The proposed solutions should be built on advances in ICT but should pay attention to multi-disciplinary aspects involving sociological, behavioural and other relevant disciplines. Gender and ethical issues must also be considered.

Five INNOSOC students, supervised by two INNOSOC lecturers, will collaborate on answering how innovative ICT solutions for assisting elderly or sick people in their everyday activities can improve their daily life at home. These activities will be conducted as a part of the ERASMUS+ blended mobility and will be finalized during INNOSOC Zagreb 2016 workshop in late April 2016.

Relationship with H2020 challenge

An important Societal Challenge addressed by the Horizon 2020 is Health, demographic change and wellbeing. For this reason EU have invested around €1,200 million in 2014/2015 in this Challenge. This Case Study will search answers for following two issues that are research and innovation topics under “Personalising health and care” project call in the Horizon 2020 programme:

improve our ability to monitor health and to prevent, detect, treat and manage disease;
support older persons to remain active and healthy.

This Case Study aims to find and integrate new solutions built on advances in ICT and Internet of Things (IoT). Although there are many solutions for activity and health status monitoring, we still lack integrated solutions that are characterized with sufficiently high degree of acceptability by the elderly.

Relationship with INNOSOC

The INNOSOC project aim is to set up an intensive study program in the field of innovations based on ICT targeting Societal Challenges defined by Europe 2020 and Horizon 2020 programmes. The INNOSOC curricula will pay a special attention to the following aspects: “innovation” as a core topic; intercultural topics, with focus on “multicultural teams”; ICT topics, with focus on “innovative engineering based on ICT”; and student projects, with focus on “case studies on how ICT can contribute to innovative societal development”. This Case Study will consider all these aspects.

First, the Case Study will cover new trends and technologies in ambient assisted living (AAL) trying to promote the usage of innovative solutions for communication (e.g., Bluetooth Low Energy and Zigbee), data storage and processing in cloud, visualization on mobile devices and smart TVs.
Second, the Case Study aims to find solutions regarding AAL, activity and health monitoring systems based on latest advances in ICT. ICT and web-based technologies create opportunities to help people in their daily life while monitoring them to promote their independence, safety and social contact through communication solutions offered by using ICT solutions.

Third, lifestyles in different countries are different. Assisted living may have manifold interpretations depending on the nationality of elderly people. The teamwork, where members are from different countries, is a great opportunity to discover and identify the special characteristics of the demands arose across the countries the students are from.

Sources

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/societal-challenges

[2] http://www.2020-horizon.com/Health-demographic-change-and-wellbeing-t10564.html

[3] http://www.aal-europe.eu/about/objectives/

[4] Nuno M. Garcia, Joel Jose P.C. Rodrigues. Ambient Assisted Living, CRC Press, 2015

[5] I Orha , S Oniga, Study regarding the optimal sensors placement on the body for human activity recognition, 2014 IEEE 20th International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME) Conference Proceedings: 23–26 Oct. 2014, Bucharest, Romania, pp. 203-206. (ISBN: 978-1-4799-6961-6) 10.1109/SIITME.2014.6967028

[6] G. Sebestyen, A. Hangan, S. Oniga, Z. Gal, eHealth Solutions in the Context of Internet of Things, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Automation, Quality and Testing, Robotics THETA 19th edition (AQTR 2014), Cluj-Napoca, Romania, DOI: 10.1109/AQTR.2014.6857876

[7] S. Oniga, P. Pop-Sitar, Application Possibilities of Hardware Implemented Hybrid Neural Networks to Support Independent Life of Elderly People, Proceedings of Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems: 8th International Conference, HAIS 2013, Salamanca, Spain, September 11-13, 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 2013, pp. 520-529.

[8] Röcker, C. (2011). Designing Ambient Assisted Living Applications: An Overview of State-of-the-Art Implementation Concepts. In: X. Chunxiao (Ed.): Modeling, Simulation and Control, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Digital Engineering (ICIDE 2011), September 16- 18, Singapore, pp. 167 – 172.

[9] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~yang/software/WAR/index.html

[10] http://courses.media.mit.edu/2004fall/mas622j/04.projects/home/

Possible architecture of the system for daily life assistance

Example of an ambient assisted living (AAL) system for improving daily life at home for elderly people (photo: Cibek)

Questions that need answers

What are the ambient assisted living (AAL) systems main features? What are the most desired features?
What kind of hardware (processing units, sensors, I/O devices) and software can be used to monitor human activity in home environment and what are their characteristics?
What type of communication protocols are used in AAL systems? Outline pros and cons (e.g., range, energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, reliability, flexibility) for each of them.
How could assistive robots improve everyday life of older people from point of view of personal assistance, active living, mental health and social inclusion? Describe some scenarios.
What is the state of the global AAL systems market (sales, costs, reliability, flexibility, applicability to realistic settings, acceptability, popularity)?
What kind of physiological parameters can be monitored at home and how can be used this data remotely? What are the security issues of people using the devices and data security?
What are the most used human activity recognition methods, what are their computational requirements and where can be done this?
What possibilities exist for data storage, visualization and analysis of human activity and health parameters? Outline pros and cons.
How popular are pervasive and mobile applications for activity monitoring and daily life assistance and what is the state of tele-health or health-related services and information via telecommunications technologies?
How can we innovate the AAL systems? Analyse devices and services for health monitoring to prevent, detect, treat and manage disease and how to support older persons to remain active and healthy?