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

Towards integrating emotion into intelligent context

Context-aware systems have traditionally employed a limited range of contextual data. While research is addressing an increasingly broad range of contextual data, the level of intelligence generated in context-aware systems is restricted by the failure to effectively implement emotional response. This paper considers emotion as it relates to context and the application of computational intelligence in context-aware systems. Following an introduction, personalization and the computational landscape is considered and context is introduced. Computational intelligence and the relationship to the Semantic Web is discussed with consideration of the nature of knowledge and a brief overview of knowledge engineering. Cognitive conceptual models and semiotics are introduced with a comparative analysis and approaches to implementation. Ongoing research with illustrative 'next generation' intelligent context-aware systems incorporating emotional responses are briefly considered. The paper concludes with a discussion where the challenges and opportunities are addressed; there are closing observations, consideration of future directions for research, and identification of open research questions. © 2013 Springer-Verlag