Remote Elderly Monitoring Systems on a Human-centric Perspective

Information systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are driving revolutionary solutions in innumerable domains, as the sensitive domain of healthcare. Indicatively, remote monitoring of patients and real-time diagnosis are anticipated as complex systems, offering various services to the associated humans (e.g. patients and caregivers). While researchers focus on the technology necessary to implement remote healthcare systems, such as Remote Elderly Monitoring System (REMS), human concerns restricting their wider adoption are often neglected. Such concerns are transformed into criticalities, that should be considered during system design. In this work, a human-centric perspective on REMS design is explored. Following this perspective, supported tasks are decodified, human concerns associated to REMS usage are identified and revealed criticalities, that stem from human concerns, are extracted. Furthermore, existing REMS implementations are examined, based on the tasks supported and criticalities addressed, resulting in the identification of ways to further improve such systems

Radar and RGB-depth sensors for fall detection: a review

This paper reviews recent works in the literature on the use of systems based on radar and RGB-Depth (RGB-D) sensors for fall detection, and discusses outstanding research challenges and trends related to this research field. Systems to detect reliably fall events and promptly alert carers and first responders have gained significant interest in the past few years in order to address the societal issue of an increasing number of elderly people living alone, with the associated risk of them falling and the consequences in terms of health treatments, reduced well-being, and costs. The interest in radar and RGB-D sensors is related to their capability to enable contactless and non-intrusive monitoring, which is an advantage for practical deployment and users’ acceptance and compliance, compared with other sensor technologies, such as video-cameras, or wearables. Furthermore, the possibility of combining and fusing information from The heterogeneous types of sensors is expected to improve the overall performance of practical fall detection systems. Researchers from different fields can benefit from multidisciplinary knowledge and awareness of the latest developments in radar and RGB-D sensors that this paper is discussing

Novel wearable antenna systems for high datarate mobile communication in healthcare

In critical healthcare applications, there is a need for reliable wideband mobile communication links, implemented by portable units with sufficient autonomy. We present the latest generation wearable antenna systems for invisible and comfortable integration in patients' or caregivers' garments. These active textile modules boast excellent performance and reliability, thanks to innovative antenna topologies, leveraged by the application of substrate integrated waveguide technology, pervasive integration of electronics and energy harvesters, and the application of multi-antenna processing techniques. Applications range from mobile communication links between caregivers and a coordination centre during interventions, over wireless sensor systems for patient monitoring, to relaying videos streams between a wireless endoscopy capsule and a remote control station

Delivering elder-care environments utilizing TV-channel based mechanisms

In this paper, we present a smart environment for elderly. What makes the development of such system challenging is that the concept of smartness for elderly brings to the extreme the idea of invisibility of the technology. In our experience, elders are well-disposed to new technologies, provided that those will not require significant changes - namely, they are invisible - to their habits. Starting from this consideration, 200 caregivers responses were collected by questionnaire, so as to better understand elders' needs and habits. A system was subsequently developed allowing elders to access a number of "modern web services" as standard TV channels: at channel 43 there is the health status, at channel 45 the photos of the family, at 46 the agenda of the week, just to mention few of the available services. The content of such services is automatically generated by the smart devices in the environment and is managed by the caregivers (e.g., family members) by simple web apps. Fourteen families were asked to install the system in their house. The results of these experiments confirm that the proposed system is considered effective and user-friendly by elders

Monitoring and detection of agitation in dementia: towards real-time and big-data solutions

The changing demographic profile of the population has potentially challenging social, geopolitical, and financial consequences for individuals, families, the wider society, and governments globally. The demographic change will result in a rapidly growing elderly population with healthcare implications which importantly include Alzheimer type conditions (a leading cause of dementia). Dementia requires long term care to manage the negative behavioral symptoms which are primarily exhibited in terms of agitation and aggression as the condition develops. This paper considers the nature of dementia along with the issues and challenges implicit in its management. The Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD) are introduced with factors (precursors) to the onset of agitation and aggression. Independent living is considered, health monitoring and implementation in context-aware decision-support systems is discussed with consideration of data analytics. Implicit in health monitoring are technical and ethical constraints, we briefly consider these constraints with the ability to generalize to a range of medical conditions. We postulate that health monitoring offers exciting potential opportunities however the challenges lie in the effective realization of independent assisted living while meeting the ethical challenges, achieving this remains an open research question remains.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Interoperable services based on activity monitoring in ambient assisted living environments

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is considered as the main technological solution that will enable the aged and people in recovery to maintain their independence and a consequent high quality of life for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. This goal is achieved by monitoring human’s activities and deploying the appropriate collection of services to set environmental features and satisfy user preferences in a given context. However, both human monitoring and services deployment are particularly hard to accomplish due to the uncertainty and ambiguity characterising human actions, and heterogeneity of hardware devices composed in an AAL system. This research addresses both the aforementioned challenges by introducing 1) an innovative system, based on Self Organising Feature Map (SOFM), for automatically classifying the resting location of a moving object in an indoor environment and 2) a strategy able to generate context-aware based Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) services in order to maximize the users’ comfort and hardware interoperability level. The overall system runs on a distributed embedded platform with a specialised ceiling- mounted video sensor for intelligent activity monitoring. The system has the ability to learn resting locations, to measure overall activity levels, to detect specific events such as potential falls and to deploy the right sequence of fuzzy services modelled through FML for supporting people in that particular context. Experimental results show less than 20% classification error in monitoring human activities and providing the right set of services, showing the robustness of our approach over others in literature with minimal power consumption