Acceptance of ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies among older Australians : a review of barriers in user experience

One of the great challenges facing Australian society is that of an ageing population. Amongst the issues involved in this drastic demographic change, the most significant aspect is the demand for older Australians to live independently at home. The development of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies aims to address this issue. The advancement of AAL applications have been done to support the users with their daily-life activities and health concerns by providing increased mobility, security, safety in emergencies, health-monitoring, improved lifestyle, and fall-detection through the use of sensors. However, the optimum uptake of these technologies among the end-users (the elderly Australians) still remains a big concern. Thus, there is an elevated need to understand the needs and preferences of the seniors in order to improve the acceptance of AAL applications. The aim of this study is to investigate the barriers and perceptions in the use of AAL applications amongst older Australians. Focus groups and quantitative surveys have been conducted to provide a detailed analysis of these impediments. The results show that there are different factors that restrict the use of these technologies along with the fact that elderly people have certain preferences when using them. An understanding of these factors has been gained and suggestions have been made to increase the acceptance of AAL devices. This work gives useful insights towards the design of AAL solutions according to user needs

State of the art of audio- and video based solutions for AAL

Working Group 3. Audio- and Video-based AAL ApplicationsIt is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one’s activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters (e.g., heart rate, respiratory rate). Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as they can have a large range of sensing, do not require physical presence at a particular location and are physically intangible. Moreover, relevant information about individuals’ activities and health status can derive from processing audio signals (e.g., speech recordings). Nevertheless, as the other side of the coin, cameras and microphones are often perceived as the most intrusive technologies from the viewpoint of the privacy of the monitored individuals. This is due to the richness of the information these technologies convey and the intimate setting where they may be deployed. Solutions able to ensure privacy preservation by context and by design, as well as to ensure high legal and ethical standards are in high demand. After the review of the current state of play and the discussion in GoodBrother, we may claim that the first solutions in this direction are starting to appear in the literature. A multidisciplinary 4 debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio- and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely (i) lifelogging and self-monitoring, (ii) remote monitoring of vital signs, (iii) emotional state recognition, (iv) food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, (v) activity and personal assistance, (vi) gesture recognition, (vii) fall detection and prevention, (viii) mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and (ix) cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed.publishedVersio

HUMAN FOLLOWING ON ROS FRAMEWORK A MOBILE ROBOT

Service mobile robot is playing a more critical role in today's society as more people such as a disabled person or the elderly are in need of mobile robot assistance. An autonomous person following ability shows great importance to the overall role of service mobile robot in assisting human. The objective of this paper focuses on developing a robot follow a person. The robot is equipped with the necessary sensors such as a Microsoft Kinect sensor and a Hokuyo laser sensor. Four suitable tracking methods are introduced in this project which is implemented and tested on the person following algorithm. The tracking methods implemented are face detection, leg detection, color detection and person blob detection. All of the algorithms implementations in this project is performed using Robot Operating System (ROS). The result showed that the mobile robot could track and follow the target person based on the person movement.

How Prefrail Older People Living Alone Perceive Information and Communications Technology and What They Would Ask a Robot for : Qualitative Study

Background: In the last decade, the family system has changed significantly. Although in the past, older people used to live with their children, nowadays, they cannot always depend on assistance of their relatives. Many older people wish to remain as independent as possible while remaining in their homes, even when living alone. To do so, there are many tasks that they must perform to maintain their independence in everyday life, and above all, their well-being. Information and communications technology (ICT), particularly robotics and domotics, could play a pivotal role in aging, especially in contemporary society, where relatives are not always able to accurately and constantly assist the older person. Objective: The aim of this study was to understand the needs, preferences, and views on ICT of some prefrail older people who live alone. In particular, we wanted to explore their attitude toward a hypothetical caregiver robot and the functions they would ask for. Methods: We designed a qualitative study based on an interpretative phenomenological approach. A total of 50 potential participants were purposively recruited in a big town in Northern Italy and were administered the Fried scale (to assess the participants\u2019 frailty) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (to evaluate the older person\u2019s capacity to comprehend the interview questions). In total, 25 prefrail older people who lived alone participated in an individual semistructured interview, lasting approximately 45 min each. Overall, 3 researchers independently analyzed the interviews transcripts, identifying meaning units, which were later grouped in clustering of themes, and finally in emergent themes. Constant triangulation among researchers and their reflective attitude assured trustiness. Results: From this study, it emerged that a number of interviewees who were currently using ICT (ie, smartphones) did not own a computer in the past, or did not receive higher education, or were not all young older people (aged 65-74 years). Furthermore, we found that among the older people who described their relationship with ICT as negative, many used it in everyday life. Referring to robotics, the interviewees appeared quite open-minded. In particular, robots were considered suitable for housekeeping, for monitoring older people\u2019s health and accidental falls, and for entertainment. Conclusions: Older people\u2019s use and attitudes toward ICT does not always seem to be related to previous experiences with technological devices, higher education, or lower age. Furthermore, many participants in this study were able to use ICT, even if they did not always acknowledge it. Moreover, many interviewees appeared to be open-minded toward technological devices, even toward robots. Therefore, proposing new advanced technology to a group of prefrail people, who are self-sufficient and can live alone at home, seems to be feasible

Competitive Live Evaluation of Activity-recognition Systems

In order to ensure the validity and usability of activity recognition approaches, an agreement on a set of standard evaluation methods is needed. Due to the diversity of the sensors and other hardware employed, designing and accepting standard tests is a difficult task. This article presents an initiative to evaluate activity recognition systems: a living-lab evaluation established through an annual competition − EvAAL-AR (Evaluating Ambient Assisted Living Systems through Competitive Benchmarking − Activity Recognition). In the competition, each team brings their own activity-recognition system, which is evaluated live on the same activity scenario performed by an actor. The evaluation criteria attempt to capture the practical usability: recognition accuracy, user acceptance, recognition delay, installation complexity, and interoperability with ambient assisted living systems. The article also presents the competing systems with emphasis on two best-performing ones: (i) a system that achieved the best recognition accuracy, and (ii) a system that was evaluated as the best overall. Finally, the article presents lessons learned from the competition and ideas for future development of the competition and of the activity recognition field in general

A multi-modal perception based assistive robotic system for the elderly

Edited by Giovanni Maria Farinella, Takeo Kanade, Marco Leo, Gerard G. Medioni, Mohan TrivediInternational audienceIn this paper, we present a multi-modal perception based framework to realize a non-intrusive domestic assistive robotic system. It is non-intrusive in that it only starts interaction with a user when it detects the user's intention to do so. All the robot's actions are based on multi-modal perceptions which include user detection based on RGB-D data, user's intention-for-interaction detection with RGB-D and audio data, and communication via user distance mediated speech recognition. The utilization of multi-modal cues in different parts of the robotic activity paves the way to successful robotic runs (94% success rate). Each presented perceptual component is systematically evaluated using appropriate dataset and evaluation metrics. Finally the complete system is fully integrated on the PR2 robotic platform and validated through system sanity check runs and user studies with the help of 17 volunteer elderly participants

Design and evaluation of a smart home voice interface for the elderly ― Acceptability and objection aspects

Impact-F=1.13 estim. in 2012International audienceSmart homes equipped with ambient intelligence technology constitute a promising direction to enable the growing number of elderly to continue to live in their own home as long as possible. However, this calls for technological solutions that suit their specific needs and capabilities. The SWEET-HOME project aims at developing a new user friendly technology for home automation based on voice command. This paper reports a user evaluation assessing the acceptance and fear of this new technology. Eight healthy persons between 71 and 88 years old, 7 relatives (child, grandchild or friend) and 3 professional carers participated in a user evaluation. During about 45 min, the persons were questioned in co-discovery in the DOMUS smart home alternating between interview and wizard of Oz periods followed by a debriefing. The experience aimed at testing four important aspects of the project: voice command, communication with the outside world, domotics system interrupting a person's activity, and electronic agenda. Voice interface appeared to have a great potential to ease daily living for elderly and frail persons and would be better accepted than more intrusive solutions. By considering still healthy and independent elderly people in the user evaluation, an interesting finding that came up is their overall acceptance provided the system does not drive them to a lazy lifestyle by taking control of everything. This particular fear must be addressed for the development of smart homes that support daily living by giving them more ability to control rather than putting them away from the daily routine