A hierarchal framework for recognising activities of daily life

PhDIn today’s working world the elderly who are dependent can sometimes be neglected by society. Statistically, after toddlers it is the elderly who are observed to have higher accident rates while performing everyday activities. Alzheimer’s disease is one of the major impairments that elderly people suffer from, and leads to the elderly person not being able to live an independent life due to forgetfulness. One way to support elderly people who aspire to live an independent life and remain safe in their home is to find out what activities the elderly person is carrying out at a given time and provide appropriate assistance or institute safeguards. The aim of this research is to create improved methods to identify tasks related to activities of daily life and determine a person’s current intentions and so reason about that person’s future intentions. A novel hierarchal framework has been developed, which recognises sensor events and maps them to significant activities and intentions. As privacy is becoming a growing concern, the monitoring of an individual’s behaviour can be seen as intrusive. Hence, the monitoring is based around using simple non intrusive sensors and tags on everyday objects that are used to perform daily activities around the home. Specifically there is no use of any cameras or visual surveillance equipment, though the techniques developed are still relevant in such a situation. Models for task recognition and plan recognition have been developed and tested on scenarios where the plans can be interwoven. Potential targets are people in the first stages of Alzheimer’s disease and in the structuring of the library of kernel plan sequences, typical routines used to sustain meaningful activity have been used. Evaluations have been carried out using volunteers conducting activities of daily life in an experimental home environment. The results generated from the sensors have been interpreted and analysis of developed algorithms has been made. The outcomes and findings of these experiments demonstrate that the developed hierarchal framework is capable of carrying activity recognition as well as being able to carry out intention analysis, e.g. predicting what activity they are most likely to carry out next

A review of smart homes in healthcare

The technology of Smart Homes (SH), as an instance of ambient assisted living technologies, is designed to assist the homes’ residents accomplishing their daily-living activities and thus having a better quality of life while preserving their privacy. A SH system is usually equipped with a collection of inter-related software and hardware components to monitor the living space by capturing the behaviour of the resident and understanding his activities. By doing so the system can inform about risky situations and take actions on behalf of the resident to his satisfaction. The present survey will address technologies and analysis methods and bring examples of the state of the art research studies in order to provide background for the research community. In particular, the survey will expose infrastructure technologies such as sensors and communication platforms along with artificial intelligence techniques used for modeling and recognizing activities. A brief overview of approaches used to develop Human–Computer interfaces for SH systems is given. The survey also highlights the challenges and research trends in this area

Central monitoring system for ambient assisted living

Smart homes for aged care enable the elderly to stay in their own homes longer. By means of various types of ambient and wearable sensors information is gathered on people living in smart homes for aged care. This information is then processed to determine the activities of daily living (ADL) and provide vital information to carers. Many examples of smart homes for aged care can be found in literature, however, little or no evidence can be found with respect to interoperability of various sensors and devices along with associated functions. One key element with respect to interoperability is the central monitoring system in a smart home. This thesis analyses and presents key functions and requirements of a central monitoring system. The outcomes of this thesis may benefit developers of smart homes for aged care

Smart kitchen for Ambient Assisted Living

El envejecimiento de la población es una realidad en todos los países desarrollados. Las predicciones de crecimiento de esta población son alarmantes, planteando un reto para los servicios sociales y sanitarios. Las personas ancianas padecen diversas discapacidades que se van acentuando con la edad, siendo más propensas a sufrir accidentes domésticos, presentando problemas para realizar tareas cotidianas, etc. Esta situación conlleva a una pérdida paulatina de capacidades que en muchas ocasiones acaba con la vida autónoma de la persona. En este contexto, las Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación (TIC) aplicadas al entorno doméstico pueden jugar un papel importante, permitiendo que las personas ancianas vivan más tiempo, de forma independiente en su propio hogar, presentando, por tanto, una alternativa a la hospitalización o institucionalización de las mismas. Este trabajo da un paso más en este sentido, presentando el diseño y desarrollo de un Ambiente Inteligente en la cocina, que ayuda a las personas ancianas y/o con discapacidad a desempeñar sus actividades de la vida diaria de una forma más fácil y sencilla. Esta tesis realiza sus principales aportaciones en dos campos: El metodológico y el tecnológico. Por un lado se presenta una metodología sistemática para extraer necesidades de colectivos específicos a fin de mejorar la información disponible por el equipo de diseño del producto, servicio o sistema. Esta metodología se basa en el estudio de la interacción Hombre-Máquina en base a los paradigmas y modelos existentes y el modelado y descripción de las capacidades del usuario en la misma utilizado el lenguaje estandarizado propuesto en la Clasificación Internacional del Funcionamiento, de la Discapacidad y de la Salud (CIF). Adicionalmente, se plantea el problema de la evaluación tecnológica, diseñando la metodología de evaluación de la tecnología con la finalidad de conocer su accesibilidad, funcionalidad y usabilidad del sistema desarrollado y aplicándola a 61 usuarios y 31 profesionales de la gerontología. Desde un punto de vista técnico, se afronta el diseño de un ambiente asistido inteligente (Ambient Assisted Living, AAL) en la cocina, planteando y definiendo la arquitectura del sistema. Esta arquitectura, basada en OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), oferta un sistema modular, con altas capacidades de interoperabilidad y escalabilidad. Además, se diseña e implementa una red de sensores distribuida en el entorno con el fin de obtener la mayor información posible del contexto, presentando distintos algoritmos para obtener información de alto nivel: detección de caídas o localización. Todos los dispositivos presentes en el entorno han sido modelados utilizando la taxonomía propuesta en OSGi4AmI, extendiendo la misma a los electrodomésticos más habituales de la cocina. Finalmente, se presenta el diseño e implementación de la inteligencia del sistema, que en función de la información procedente del contexto y de las capacidades del usuario da soporte a las principales actividades de la vida diaria (AVD) en la cocina

The Internet of Hackable Things

The Internet of Things makes possible to connect each everyday object to the Internet, making computing pervasive like never before. From a security and privacy perspective, this tsunami of connectivity represents a disaster, which makes each object remotely hackable. We claim that, in order to tackle this issue, we need to address a new challenge in security: education

Assistive technology design and development for acceptable robotics companions for ageing years

© 2013 Farshid Amirabdollahian et al., licensee Versita Sp. z o. o. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.A new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to some overlooked aspects of technology design, divided into multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, and monitoring persons’ activities at home. To bring these aspects together, a dedicated task is identified to ensure technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. Formative and summative evaluation cycles are then used to assess the emerging prototype towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot, for example role as a butler or a trainer, while also comparing user requirements to achieved progress. In a novel approach, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles, for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developmentsPeer reviewe

Inferring Complex Activities for Context-aware Systems within Smart Environments

The rising ageing population worldwide and the prevalence of age-related conditions such as physical fragility, mental impairments and chronic diseases have significantly impacted the quality of life and caused a shortage of health and care services. Over-stretched healthcare providers are leading to a paradigm shift in public healthcare provisioning. Thus, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) using Smart Homes (SH) technologies has been rigorously investigated to help address the aforementioned problems. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a critical component in AAL systems which enables applications such as just-in-time assistance, behaviour analysis, anomalies detection and emergency notifications. This thesis is aimed at investigating challenges faced in accurately recognising Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) performed by single or multiple inhabitants within smart environments. Specifically, this thesis explores five complementary research challenges in HAR. The first study contributes to knowledge by developing a semantic-enabled data segmentation approach with user-preferences. The second study takes the segmented set of sensor data to investigate and recognise human ADLs at multi-granular action level; coarse- and fine-grained action level. At the coarse-grained actions level, semantic relationships between the sensor, object and ADLs are deduced, whereas, at fine-grained action level, object usage at the satisfactory threshold with the evidence fused from multimodal sensor data is leveraged to verify the intended actions. Moreover, due to imprecise/vague interpretations of multimodal sensors and data fusion challenges, fuzzy set theory and fuzzy web ontology language (fuzzy-OWL) are leveraged. The third study focuses on incorporating uncertainties caused in HAR due to factors such as technological failure, object malfunction, and human errors. Hence, existing studies uncertainty theories and approaches are analysed and based on the findings, probabilistic ontology (PR-OWL) based HAR approach is proposed. The fourth study extends the first three studies to distinguish activities conducted by more than one inhabitant in a shared smart environment with the use of discriminative sensor-based techniques and time-series pattern analysis. The final study investigates in a suitable system architecture with a real-time smart environment tailored to AAL system and proposes microservices architecture with sensor-based off-the-shelf and bespoke sensing methods. The initial semantic-enabled data segmentation study was evaluated with 100% and 97.8% accuracy to segment sensor events under single and mixed activities scenarios. However, the average classification time taken to segment each sensor events have suffered from 3971ms and 62183ms for single and mixed activities scenarios, respectively. The second study to detect fine-grained-level user actions was evaluated with 30 and 153 fuzzy rules to detect two fine-grained movements with a pre-collected dataset from the real-time smart environment. The result of the second study indicate good average accuracy of 83.33% and 100% but with the high average duration of 24648ms and 105318ms, and posing further challenges for the scalability of fusion rule creations. The third study was evaluated by incorporating PR-OWL ontology with ADL ontologies and Semantic-Sensor-Network (SSN) ontology to define four types of uncertainties presented in the kitchen-based activity. The fourth study illustrated a case study to extended single-user AR to multi-user AR by combining RFID tags and fingerprint sensors discriminative sensors to identify and associate user actions with the aid of time-series analysis. The last study responds to the computations and performance requirements for the four studies by analysing and proposing microservices-based system architecture for AAL system. A future research investigation towards adopting fog/edge computing paradigms from cloud computing is discussed for higher availability, reduced network traffic/energy, cost, and creating a decentralised system. As a result of the five studies, this thesis develops a knowledge-driven framework to estimate and recognise multi-user activities at fine-grained level user actions. This framework integrates three complementary ontologies to conceptualise factual, fuzzy and uncertainties in the environment/ADLs, time-series analysis and discriminative sensing environment. Moreover, a distributed software architecture, multimodal sensor-based hardware prototypes, and other supportive utility tools such as simulator and synthetic ADL data generator for the experimentation were developed to support the evaluation of the proposed approaches. The distributed system is platform-independent and currently supported by an Android mobile application and web-browser based client interfaces for retrieving information such as live sensor events and HAR results

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