350 research outputs found

    Enhancement of a body area network to support smart health monitoring at the digital home

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    The deployment of home-based smart health services requires effective and reliable systems for personal and environmental data management. ooperation between Home Area Networks (HAN) and Body Area Networks (BAN) can provide smart systems with ad hoc reasoning information to support health care. This paper details the implementation of an architecture that integrates BAN, HAN and intelligent agents to manage physiological and environmental data to proactively detect risk situations at the digital home. The system monitors dynamic situations and timely adjusts its behavior to detect user risks concerning to health. Thus, this work provides a reasoning framework to infer appropriate solutions in cases of health risk episodes. Proposed smart health monitoring approach integrates complex reasoning according to home environment, user profile and physiological parameters defined by a scalable ontology. As a result, health care demands can be detected to activate adequate internal mechanisms and report public health services for requested actions

    WEARABLE MULTI-SENSOR SYSTEM FOR TELEMEDICINE APPLICATIONS

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    In this paper, we describe a technical design of wearable multi-sensor systems for physiological data measurement and wide medical applications, significantly impacted in telehealth. The monitors are composed of three analog front-end (AFE) devices, which assist with interfacing digital electronics to the noise-, time-sensitive physiological sensors for measuring ECG (heart-rate monitor), RR (respiration-rate monitor), SRL (skin resistivity monitor). These three types of sensors can be used separately or together and allow to determine a number of parameters for the assessment of mental and physical condition. The system is designed based on requirements for demanding environments even outside the realm of medical applications, and in accordance with Health and Safety at Work directives (89/391/CE and Seveso-II 96/82/EC) for occupational hygiene, medical, rehabilitation, sports and fitness applications

    Advances in Telecare over The Past Ten Years

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    This article reviews advances during the past decade or so in telecare (ie, computer-supported social care at home). The need for telecare is discussed along with how it relates to social and health care. The expected benefits of telecare are also discussed. The evolution of telecare technology is reviewed, covering various system generations. The capabilities of present day telecare are covered, along with its advantages, limitations, and barriers to uptake. Recent evaluations and exemplars of telecare are discussed. The user requirements for telecare are presented, complemented by a discussion of the issues in user and professional acceptance. The article concludes with a summary of past developments in telecare and the prospects for the future

    Multi-agent personal memory assistant

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    Springer - Series Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, vol. 71Memory is one of our most precious goods has it gives us the ability to store, retain and recall information thus giving a meaning to our past and help us to envision our future, dreams and expectations. However, ageing decreases the capacity of remembering and the capacity to store new memories, thus affecting our life quality. These presented problems configure a social and human dilemma. With the presented work we intend to address some of these problems, thru the use of the Personal Memory Assistant (PMA) concept in order to help its user to remember things and occurrences in a proactive manner. We will also address socialization and relaxation events that should be part of the user's life. With the use of a Multi-Agent System to implement the PMA, the objectives can be achieved in a ubiquitous and highly configurable manner. It is presented here the platform concept, scheme and the agent characteristics and their contribution to each and every agent

    ZigBee Based Control System for People with Multiple Disabilities: A Review

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    Most of the existing smart home monitoring and control systems do not accommodate special needy users to manage their home appliances. A wireless sensor network based system for smart home automation will be designed, built and tested to address such missing functionality. The to be implemented system’s major contribution is that it is customized to provide the special need residents with tools and services to monitor and operate home appliances remotely. The implemented system provides home residents with disabilities to take advantage of the advancement in technology. It enables them to perform their daily activities by remotely monitoring and controlling their home appliances without having to depend on others. The system will be programmed so that it can be configured to adjust to the customer’s disability providing them with better and convenient lifestyle. It is worth mentioning that the system is scalable and can be extended to include more and different services and tools. The system is portable, compact, affordable and easy to use

    Inter-organization cooperation for ambient assisted living

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    In the last years we have witnessed to a substantial increase on the number of people in need of care services, espe-cially among the elderly, a phenomenon related to population ageing. However, this is becoming not exclusive of the elderly, as diseases like obesity, diabetes, and blood pressure have been increasing amongst young adults. This is a new reality which needs to be dealt by the healthcare sector, specifically the public one. Given these new scenarios, the importance of finding new and cost-effective ways for health care delivery are of particular relevance, especially when it is believed that these new patients should not be removed from their natural, day-to-day life, environment. The evolution of the, so called, new technolo-gies may pay here a very important role as they may become part of the solution for this new problematic. Actually, they are already been used as, in recent years, several projects have raised in this relatively new area of work. These projects, although legitimate ones, were essential for delineating a path to pursue for others to come, as they were in some case, very simple ones (e.g. panic buttons), and, especially, reactive ones. In this paper, we are going to present how we are trying to evolve these projects a step further, through the introduction of proactiveness as a key factor, taking advantage of “new”, as in applied to this areas, techniques of decision making, idea generation, argumentation and data quality, applied, not only to the in transit information, but also to the one provided by the several intervenient as well as themselves. In order to be able to pursue this delineated path, a new approach for knowledge representation, reasoning, and even for problem solving is proposed. To achieve these goals, the VirtualECare environment is presented, together with its sustaining infrastructure and architecture. Particular attention will be paidto how it may be used to simulate a virtual Assisted Living Environment in order to, later, bet-ter monitor real ones, attending to its customers’ needs
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