Toward a Context-Aware and Automatic Evaluation of Elderly Dependency in Smart Homes and Cities

International audienceIn this work, we propose a framework for automatic dependency evaluation that can notify the changes of the elderly dependency, hence providing persons with required services in time. In order to validate our approach, we target the French dependent population. Especially, we focus our proposal on the AGGIR dependency model used in the French medical field. Our objective is to provide a flexible architecture and an extensible model linked to opened data that can refer to a wide variety of services (hardware sensors and software; simple or composed services)

Improving Pathways to Transit for Persons with Disabilities

Persons with disabilities can achieve a greater degree of freedom when they have full access to a variety of transit modes, but this can only be achieved when the pathways to transit – the infrastructure and conditions in the built environment – allow full access to transit stops, stations, and vehicles. Since passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, many transit agencies and governmental jurisdictions have made significant progress in this area. Policy initiatives, incremental enhancements, modifications, and other measures undertaken by transit agencies and their partners have significantly improved access to transit for persons with disabilities, others who rely on public transportation, and individuals who chose to utilize these services. This research study explores, through case study work, efforts that have been effective in improving pathways to transit. Interviews and site visits were conducted with five transit agencies, along with their partners, that are actively engaged in improving pathways to connect transit consumers – particularly people with disabilities – with transit stations and stops. These agencies are: Broward County Transit (Broward County, FL), Memphis Area Transit Authority (Memphis, TN), NJ TRANSIT (Newark and New Brunswick, NJ), Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (Portland, OR), and Link Transit (Wenatchee, WA). Promising practices and/or lessons were identified through the case study analysis; these should be considered by any transit agency seeking to create improved access to its services for persons with disabilities

Weathering the Nest: Privacy Implications of Home Monitoring for the Aging American Population

The research in this paper will seek to ascertain the extent of personal data entry and collection required to enjoy at least the minimal promised benefits of distributed intelligence and monitoring in the home. Particular attention will be given to the abilities and sensitivities of the population most likely to need these devices, notably the elderly and disabled. The paper will then evaluate whether existing legal limitations on the collection, maintenance, and use of such data are applicable to devices currently in use in the home environment and whether such regulations effectively protect privacy. Finally, given appropriate policy parameters, the paper will offer proposals to effectuate reasonable and practical privacy-protective solutions for developers and consumers

Dissertation: Examining and investigating home modifications and smart home technologies to reduce fall injury among older adults.

Nearly one in six U.S. residents are over the age of 65. The proportion of older adults in the U.S. is anticipated to grow to 22.1% of the total population by 2050. The cost of treating age related conditions and injuries is expensive, government programs including Medicaid paid over $550 Billion in 2017, and makes up between 14-16% of the federal budget each year. With the high cost of treating age related conditions and injuries, and the proportion of older adults continuing to increase every year, it is imperative that researchers and government entities find and invest in preventative measures in order to reduce injury and related healthcare costs. Among the many age-related injuries older adults suffer, falls are arguably the most important to address. It is estimated that one in three older adults has a fall every year. In 2016, falls were the seventh leading cause of death among older adults. Approximately one third of all fallers require medical attention after experiencing a fall. Over 800,000 older adults are hospitalized each year due to fall related injuries. Injuries sustained as a result of a serious fall include various fractures, traumatic brain injuries, and other cuts and bruises.Home modifications, and more recently smart home technologies, can help increase the safety of older adults living in the community. With older adults wanting to “age in place”, installing these modifications and technologies before an accident happens may lower rates of injury. Today, dozens of companies sell various smart home devices for the consumer market. Bud despite the high demand for these technologies by the American consumer, the ability of these devices to keep older adults safe, and how older adults value these technologies, remains uncertain. These home technologies may be particularly beneficial to older adults living in rural areas due to the increased isolation and limited access to healthcare resources. Previous research indicates rural populations have a greater proportion of older adults compared to urban areas, yet lack the infrastructure to provide specialty care to this population. It is estimated that more than 60 million family members provide some sort of informal care to an older adult relative. Of all of these family members, nearly 40% report spending 20 or more hours a week providing this unpaid care. Previous research has failed to examine how these family members feel about home modifications and technologies for their older adult relative. Finding ways to ease the burden of caring for older family members will significantly better the situations of many family relatives.This dissertation aims to cover three areas. 1. Identify people at risk of suffering subsequent fall injuries. Find the average time between an initial fall injury and a subsequent fall injury, and find average time between an initial fall injury and death.2. Examine the preferences of older adults living in a rural area towards various smart home technologies and home modifications.3. Examine the preferences of family members of older adults regarding smart home technologies and home modifications

The Elderly in the Digital World and Digital Inclusion of the Elderly: An Exemplary Mobile Application for the Elderly

In the modern day, technological developments are advancing exponentially, improving technology brings innovations in every corner of our lives, and with such innovations, the digital world is becoming more and more central to people’s lives. It is particularly important that the elderly also take part in this digital world, where especially young and middle-aged people are more likely to be involved. Our elders are our dearest and most respected family members whom we dote on and want to take care of with utmost attention. It is one of the noblest duties to increase their welfare, happiness, and life satisfaction by providing them with a safe, secure, and comfortable living environment. The elderly need to be actively involved in the digital world in order to benefit from the developments brought about by the digital world in a way to make their lives easier, such as maintaining social connections, following up on their health, staying healthy, making financial, banking and e-government transactions, using applications that facilitate their daily lives and remind them of important appointments or medication times. By the end of 2023, approximately 10 out of every 100 people living in the world will be elderly, and this figure is expected to increase to 12 in 2030 and 16 in 2050. Of all the applications developed in our constantly aging world; the necessity for mobile applications specifically for the elderly has also gradually increased and become more and more crucial in the world of applications. The applications to be developed for the elderly will facilitate the lives of both the elderly and those who are obliged to take care of them. The aim of this research is to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the field of mobile application design for the elderly and to create a more inclusive and user-friendly technology for this growing user group. This article is analyzed in three parts. In the first section; the elderly population statistics of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) for the year 2022 are studied on a detailed basis and the attributes of the elderly population aged 65 and over in Türkiye are examined by introducing a statistical overview of the subject. The second section deals with the topics about the elderly population; namely, what are the dangers ahead of the increasing elderly population, what are the challenges for families and individuals who are responsible for caring for the elderly, what are the most frequently diagnosed diseases in the elderly, what are the expectations of the elderly from their family members, what do the elderly feel most lonely about, and how should the city life be in order to facilitate the lives of the elderly. In light of the information put forth in the first part, the following topics are discussed in the second part: Why the elderly should be included in digitalization, what are the factors that increase the digital inclusion of the elderly, the obstacles to their digitalization, the dangers of their digitalization, the obstacles to the use of technology by the elderly, digital learning of the elderly, smart homes and wearable technologies. Although these issues may seem to be related to old age, they have been addressed because they are considered essential for understanding the elderly and identifying their needs for the mobile application to be developed. Finally, in the third part of the article, various applications developed for the elderly are reviewed and an exemplary mobile application for elderly is suggested. Keywords: Old Age, Elderly, Elderly in the digital world, Mobile application for the elderly DOI: 10.7176/JIEA/13-2-05 Publication date:August31st 202

A help for assisting people based on a depth cameras system dedicated to elderly and dependent people

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a help to a comfort system development based on Kinect sensor to assist people commanding their own house by using only their gestures. The system uses a multi-sensors to detect the person, recognize her gestures and communicate through an IP/KNX gateway to act on actuators related to the home. Thus, a simple gesture is able to turn on/off the lights, to switch on/off the TV, to move up or down the shutters etc. We performed a test bed within the smart home of our University Institute of Technology in Blagnac

Intergenerational interpretation of the Internet of Things

This report investigates how different generations within a household interpret individual members’ data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). Adopting a mixed methods approach, we are interested in interpretations of the IoT by teenagers, their parents and grandparents, and how they understand and interact with the kinds of data that might be generated by IoT devices. The first part of this document is a technical review that outlines the key existing and envisaged technologies that make up the IoT. It explores the definition and scope of the Internet of Things. Hardware, networking, intelligent objects and Human-Computer Interaction implications are all discussed in detail. The second section focuses on the human perspective, looking at psychological and sociological issues relating to the interpretation of information generated by the IoT. Areas such as privacy, data ambiguity, ageism, and confirmation bias are explored. The third section brings both aspects together, examining how technical and social aspects of the IoT interact in four specific application domains: energy monitoring, groceries and shopping, physical gaming, and sharing experiences. This section also presents three household scenarios developed to communicate and explore the complexities of integrating IoT technologies into family life. The final section draws together all the findings and suggests future research

The VocADom Project: Speech Interaction for Well-being and Reliance Improvement

International audienceThe additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. Abstract The VocADom project aims to provide audio-based interaction technology that lets the users have full control over their home environment and at eases the social inclusion of the elderly and frail population. This paper presents an overview of the project focusing on multimodal corpus acquisition and labelling and on investigated techniques for speech enhancement and understanding

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