Using mobile devices and apps to assist the elder population in rural areas and generate business opportunities

Providing gerontological cares represents an increased challenge when applied to rural scenarios. This paper discusses the role of technology in gerontology and specifically how technology-based solutions can be developed to assist the elderly population in rural areas. We also characterize the Northeast Portuguese region exposing its rural characteristics and presented some demographic numbers. Finally, a conceptual model and a prototype supported by mobile devices are presented to assist and monitor the elderly and enhance business opportunities. The developed prototype allows not only to assist the elderly in a set of typical elderly population routines - such as those related to health - but also to improve the interaction between the elderly and their relatives and / or caregivers. This work is part of a more extensive effort that has been made in the search for effective solutions to assist the elderly population in rural areas, typically distant from the main health and / or support services; contributing to relieve these deficits.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Contextualized behavior patterns for ambient assisted living

International audienceHuman behavior learning plays an important role in ambient assisted living since it enables service personalization. Current work in human behavior learning do not consider the context under which a behavior occurs which hides some behaviors that are frequent only under certain conditions. In this work, we present the notion of a contextualized behavior pattern which describes a behavior pattern with the context on which it occurs (i.e. nap when raining) and propose an algorithm for finding these patterns in a data stream. This is our main contribution. These patterns help to better understand the routine of a user in a smart environment, as is evidenced when testing with a public dataset. This algorithm could be used to learn behaviors from users in an ambient assisted living environment in order to send alarms when behavior changes occur