Intelligent assisted living framework for monitoring elders

Recently, Ambient Intelligence Systems (AmI) in particular Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) are attracting intensive research due to a large variety of application scenarios and an urgent need for elderly in-home assistance. AAL is an emerging multi-disciplinary paradigm aiming at exploiting information and communication technologies in personal healthcare and telehealth systems for countering the effects of growing elderly population. AAL systems are developed to help elderly people living independently by monitoring their health status and providing caregivers with useful information. However, strong contributions are yet to be made on context binding of newly discovered sensors for providing dynamic or/and adaptive UI for caregivers, as the existing solutions (including framework, systems and platforms) are mainly focused on checking user operation history, browser history and applications that are most used by a user for prediction and display of the applications to an individual user. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for making the adaptive UI from context information (real-time and historical data) that is collected from caregivers (primary user) and elderly people (secondary user). The collected data is processed to produce the contextual information in order to provide assistive services to each individual caregiver. To achieve this, the proposed framework collects the data and it uses a set of techniques (including system learning, decision making) and approaches (including ontology, user profiling) to integrate assistive services at runtime and enable their bindings to specific caregivers, in so doing improving the adaptability parameter of UI for the AAL. © 2017 IEEE

Advances and trends for the development of ambient-assisted living platforms

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) try to achieve a future where technology surrounds the users and helps them in their daily lives. In this sense, the urgent need of solutions to cover the rapid increase of the elderly population with chronic diseases led to the increase of projects related with AAL and AmI. During the latest years, several projects have been proposed to tackle different medical problems, some building devices and others services. This paper presents iGenda and its evolution, the UserAccess, with the main objective of developing an AAL platform. It features an analysis of the latest developments and points future directions for the work. These projects display the importance of the interoperability of the platforms, demonstrating a case study for AAL development.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência eTecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013 and COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER007043. A. Costa thanks the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) the post-doc scholarship with the ref. SFRH/BPD/102696/2014. This work is also partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C41-R.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Thermo-mechanical analysis of dental silicone polymers

Soft lining materials are used to replace the inner surface of a conventional complete denture, especially for weak elderly patients, with delicate health who cannot tolerate the hard acrylic denture base. Most of these patients have fragile supporting mucosa, excessive residual ridge resorption, particularly on the mandibular arch. The application of a soft liner to the mandibular denture allows absorbing impact forces during mastication and relieving oral mucosa. Actually, the silicone rubbers constitute the main family of commercialised soft lining materials. This study was conducted to understand the relationships between the mechanical properties and the physical structure of polysiloxanes. For this purpose, a series of polysiloxanes of various chemical compositions have been investigated. The evolution of their physical structure as a function of temperature has been followed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). In order to facilitate comparisons, the mechanical modulus has been analysed upon the same heating rate using dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA). Polysiloxanes actually commercialised as soft denture liners are three-dimensional networks: the flexibility of chains allows a crystalline organisation in an amorphous phase leading to the low value of the shear modulus. The dynamic mechanical analysis shows that they are used in the rubbery state. So, polysiloxanes have steady mechanical properties during physiological utilisation

NILM techniques for intelligent home energy management and ambient assisted living: a review

The ongoing deployment of smart meters and different commercial devices has made electricity disaggregation feasible in buildings and households, based on a single measure of the current and, sometimes, of the voltage. Energy disaggregation is intended to separate the total power consumption into specific appliance loads, which can be achieved by applying Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques with a minimum invasion of privacy. NILM techniques are becoming more and more widespread in recent years, as a consequence of the interest companies and consumers have in efficient energy consumption and management. This work presents a detailed review of NILM methods, focusing particularly on recent proposals and their applications, particularly in the areas of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), where the ability to determine the on/off status of certain devices can provide key information for making further decisions. As well as complementing previous reviews on the NILM field and providing a discussion of the applications of NILM in HEMS and AAL, this paper provides guidelines for future research in these topics.Agência financiadora: Programa Operacional Portugal 2020 and Programa Operacional Regional do Algarve 01/SAICT/2018/39578 Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through IDMEC, under LAETA: SFRH/BSAB/142998/2018 SFRH/BSAB/142997/2018 UID/EMS/50022/2019 Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La-Mancha, Spain: SBPLY/17/180501/000392 Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (SOC-PLC project): TEC2015-64835-C3-2-R MINECO/FEDERinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Wearable device to assist independent living.

Older people increasingly want to remain living independently in their own homes. The aim of the ENABLE project is to develop a wearable device that can be used both within and outside of the home to support older people in their daily lives and which can monitor their health status, detect potential problems, provide activity reminders and offer communication and alarm services. In order to determine the specifications and functionality required for development of the device user surveys and focus groups were undertaken and use case analysis and scenario modeling carried out. The project has resulted in the development of a wrist worn device and mobile phone combination that can support and assist older and vulnerable wearers with a range of activities and services both inside and outside of their homes. The device is currently undergoing pilot trials in five European countries. The aim of this paper is to describe the ENABLE device, its features and services, and the infrastructure within which it operates

UNIVERSAL DESIGN APPLICATION THROUGH SOUTH KOREA REDEVELOPMENT (A Study Review)

The evolution toward Universal Design was began in the 1950s with a new attention to design for people with disabilities. At the same era South Korea began their development after several wars. Recently some of researchs and projects in South Korea which conducted on Universal Design concept are increasing in quantity and widening in multidiciplinary areas to make a better living for people in South Korea. This study examined those researches and projects to determine the progress of Universal Design principles application in South Korea in several periods and evaluated the result by the project’s purpose. This study is a review from several literatures related to universal design application in South Korea. The Review revealed that South Korea has published regulations, guidelines and law based on universal design principles. South Korea has established universal design principles as fundamental basis in designing and developing their public space, public facilities building and elderly residential houses. Application of universal design influenced the knowledge of diversity for people especialy in disability and elderly. Universal design encourage people with diversity in ability, ages, gender to live together without barrier to access and use every facilities in their regions. Keywords : Universal Design, Development, South Korea, Review, Diversit

Testing QoE in Different 3D HDTV Technologies

The three dimensional (3D) display technology has started flooding the consumer television market. There is a number of different systems available with different marketing strategies and different advertised advantages. The main goal of the experiment described in this paper is to compare the systems in terms of achievable Quality of Experience (QoE) in different situations. The display systems considered are the liquid crystal display using polarized light and passive lightweight glasses for the separation of the left- and right-eye images, a plasma display with time multiplexed images and active shutter glasses and a projection system with time multiplexed images and active shutter glasses. As no standardized test methodology has been defined for testing of stereoscopic systems, we develop our own approach to testing different aspects of QoE on different systems without reference using semantic differential scales. We present an analysis of scores with respect to different phenomena under study and define which of the tested aspects can really express a difference in the performance of the considered display technologies