Designing a gamified social platform for people living with dementia and their live-in family caregivers

In the current paper, a social gamified platform for people living with dementia and their live-in family caregivers, integrating a broader diagnostic approach and interactive interventions is presented. The CAREGIVERSPRO-MMD (C-MMD) platform constitutes a support tool for the patient and the informal caregiver - also referred to as the dyad - that strengthens self-care, and builds community capacity and engagement at the point of care. The platform is implemented to improve social collaboration, adherence to treatment guidelines through gamification, recognition of progress indicators and measures to guide management of patients with dementia, and strategies and tools to improve treatment interventions and medication adherence. Moreover, particular attention was provided on guidelines, considerations and user requirements for the design of a User-Centered Design (UCD) platform. The design of the platform has been based on a deep understanding of users, tasks and contexts in order to improve platform usability, and provide adaptive and intuitive User Interfaces with high accessibility. In this paper, the architecture and services of the C-MMD platform are presented, and specifically the gamification aspects. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations

Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified

Combining brain-computer interfaces and assistive technologies: state-of-the-art and challenges

In recent years, new research has brought the field of EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) out of its infancy and into a phase of relative maturity through many demonstrated prototypes such as brain-controlled wheelchairs, keyboards, and computer games. With this proof-of-concept phase in the past, the time is now ripe to focus on the development of practical BCI technologies that can be brought out of the lab and into real-world applications. In particular, we focus on the prospect of improving the lives of countless disabled individuals through a combination of BCI technology with existing assistive technologies (AT). In pursuit of more practical BCIs for use outside of the lab, in this paper, we identify four application areas where disabled individuals could greatly benefit from advancements in BCI technology, namely,“Communication and Control”, “Motor Substitution”, “Entertainment”, and “Motor Recovery”. We review the current state of the art and possible future developments, while discussing the main research issues in these four areas. In particular, we expect the most progress in the development of technologies such as hybrid BCI architectures, user-machine adaptation algorithms, the exploitation of users’ mental states for BCI reliability and confidence measures, the incorporation of principles in human-computer interaction (HCI) to improve BCI usability, and the development of novel BCI technology including better EEG devices

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Developing an Autonomous Mobile Robotic Device for Monitoring and Assisting Older People

A progressive increase of the elderly population in the world has required technological solutions capable of improving the life prospects of people suffering from senile dementias such as Alzheimer's. Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) in the research field of elderly care is a solution that can ensure, through observation and monitoring of behaviors, their safety and improve their physical and cognitive health. A social robot can autonomously and tirelessly monitor a person daily by providing assistive tasks such as remembering to take medication and suggesting activities to keep the assisted active both physically and cognitively. However, many projects in this area have not considered the preferences, needs, personality, and cognitive profiles of older people. Moreover, other projects have developed specific robotic applications making it difficult to reuse and adapt them on other hardware devices and for other different functional contexts. This thesis presents the development of a scalable, modular, multi-tenant robotic application and its testing in real-world environments. This work is part of the UPA4SAR project ``User-centered Profiling and Adaptation for Socially Assistive Robotics''. The UPA4SAR project aimed to develop a low-cost robotic application for faster deployment among the elderly population. The architecture of the proposed robotic system is modular, robust, and scalable due to the development of functionality in microservices with event-based communication. To improve robot acceptance the functionalities, enjoyed through microservices, adapt the robot's behaviors based on the preferences and personality of the assisted person. A key part of the assistance is the monitoring of activities that are recognized through deep neural network models proposed in this work. The final experimentation of the project carried out in the homes of elderly volunteers was performed with complete autonomy of the robotic system. Daily care plans customized to the person's needs and preferences were executed. These included notification tasks to remember when to take medication, tasks to check if basic nutrition activities were accomplished, entertainment and companionship tasks with games, videos, music for cognitive and physical stimulation of the patient

Collaborative design methodologies and social dynamics: a portuguese social and public health case study

This research project addresses the understanding of collaborative action among disciplines from distinct branches of science with particular focus on social action. It also aims to evaluate the impact of this collaborative action on responding to the needs of different highly vulnerable communities and on other participants of these same processes. The integration of design in the social sector is a growing tendency, albeit to a certain extent characterised by novelty and resistance. Hence, and within this framework, the present thesis seeks to respond to the hypothesis “Collaborative design methodologies improve the effectiveness of social services’ practice”, and is organized into six phases, namely: the theoretical framework and the main research question, the construction of the model structure of the research and identification of the hypothesis, a review of the collaborative models and Social Design framework through case studies, the application of an in-depth case, the collection, processing and analysis of data and conclusions. The aim of this research is to ascertain the influence of Design on collaborative action, namely in the generation of more effective results and in obtaining information, and its impact on other sectors (intervention, assistance, solidarity, community action and social development). Moreover, it has served to highlight the potential for future alliances with prospective partners who, in light of the developed process, have manifested an interest in establishing co-partnerships of this nature. This study sheds light upon the potential of integrating Design and Designers in organizations in general, and in particular in those that aim to respond to the needs of communities who are most exposed to social impacts. By increasing the capacity to respond to their vulnerabilities, the risk of social exclusion and isolation will be significantly reduced. Additionally, awareness on the part of social partners, of the added value of Design and its contribution to the maturity and sustainability of social processes will be enhanced

Visualization and Interaction Technologies in Serious and Exergames for Cognitive Assessment and Training: A Survey on Available Solutions and Their Validation

Exergames and serious games, based on standard personal computers, mobile devices and gaming consoles or on novel immersive Virtual and Augmented Reality techniques, have become popular in the last few years and are now applied in various research fields, among which cognitive assessment and training of heterogeneous target populations. Moreover, the adoption of Web based solutions together with the integration of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms could bring countless advantages, both for the patients and the clinical personnel, as allowing the early detection of some pathological conditions, improving the efficacy and adherence to rehabilitation processes, through the personalisation of training sessions, and optimizing the allocation of resources by the healthcare system. The current work proposes a systematic survey of existing solutions in the field of cognitive assessment and training. We evaluate the visualization and interaction technologies commonly adopted and the measures taken to fulfil the need of the pathological target populations. Moreover, we analyze how implemented solutions are validated, i.e. The chosen experimental designs, data collection and analysis. Finally, we consider the availability of the applications and raw data to the large community of researchers and medical professionals and the actual application of proposed solutions in the standard clinical practice. Despite the potential of these technologies, research is still at an early stage. Although the recent release of accessible immersive virtual reality headsets and the increasing interest on vision-based techniques for tracking body and hands movements, many studies still rely on non-immersive virtual reality (67.2%), mainly mobile and personal computers, and standard gaming tools for interactions (41.5%). Finally, we highlight that although the interest of research community in this field is increasingly higher, the sharing of dataset (10.6%) and implemented applications (3.8%) should be promoted and the number of healthcare structures which have successfully introduced the new technological approaches in the treatment of their host patients is limited (10.2%)