The OCarePlatform : a context-aware system to support independent living

Background: Currently, healthcare services, such as institutional care facilities, are burdened with an increasing number of elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses and a decreasing number of competent caregivers. Objectives: To relieve the burden on healthcare services, independent living at home could be facilitated, by offering individuals and their (in)formal caregivers support in their daily care and needs. With the rise of pervasive healthcare, new information technology solutions can assist elderly people ("residents") and their caregivers to allow residents to live independently for as long as possible. Methods: To this end, the OCarePlatform system was designed. This semantic, data-driven and cloud based back-end system facilitates independent living by offering information and knowledge-based services to the resident and his/her (in)formal caregivers. Data and context information are gathered to realize context-aware and personalized services and to support residents in meeting their daily needs. This body of data, originating from heterogeneous data and information sources, is sent to personalized services, where is fused, thus creating an overview of the resident's current situation. Results: The architecture of the OCarePlatform is proposed, which is based on a service-oriented approach, together with its different components and their interactions. The implementation details are presented, together with a running example. A scalability and performance study of the OCarePlatform was performed. The results indicate that the OCarePlatform is able to support a realistic working environment and respond to a trigger in less than 5 seconds. The system is highly dependent on the allocated memory. Conclusion: The data-driven character of the OCarePlatform facilitates easy plug-in of new functionality, enabling the design of personalized, context-aware services. The OCarePlatform leads to better support for elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses, who live independently. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Using Social Robots in Health Settings: Implications of Personalization on Human-Machine Communication

In view of the shortage of healthcare workers and a growing aging population, it is worthwhile to explore the applicability of new technologies in improving the quality of healthcare and reducing its cost. However, it remains a challenge to deploy such technologies in environments where individuals have limited knowledge about how to use them. Thus, this paper explores how the social robots designed for use in health settings in Australia have sought to overcome some of the limitations through personalization. Deployed in aged care and home-based care facilities, the social robots are person-centered, emphasizing the personalization of care with human-like attributes (e.g., human appearances) to engage in reciprocal communication with users. While there have been debates over the advantages and disadvantages of personalization, this paper discusses the implications of personalization on the design of the robots for enhancing engagement, empowerment and enablement in health settings

Survey on virtual coaching for older adults

Virtual coaching has emerged as a promising solution to extend independent living for older adults. A virtual coach system is an always-attentive personalized system that continuously monitors user's activity and surroundings and delivers interventions - that is, intentional messages - in the appropriate moment. This article presents a survey of different approaches in virtual coaching for older adults, from the less technically supported tools to the latest developments and future avenues for research. It focuses on the technical aspects, especially on software architectures, user interaction and coaching personalization. Nevertheless, some aspects from the fields of personality/social psychology are also presented in the context of coaching strategies. Coaching is considered holistically, including matters such as physical and cognitive training, nutrition, social interaction and mood.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 769830

Socially Assistive Robot Enabled Personalised Care for People with Dementia in Australian Private Homes

Australia’s population is ageing and a large number of people are living in their own homes. Motivated by design science as the research methodology, the authors in this paper embark the research on designing, implementing, trialling and evaluating robot enabled user-centred care for people with dementia in home-based settings. Given the importance of pursuing person-centred care practice, this research involves marrying personhood in health care with socially assistive robotics to the designs of social robot enabled person-centred care services. We have conducted first ever longitudinal robotic trials through real deployments in Australian private dwellings to evaluate the impact of the designed socially assistive robots on older people with dementia. The data analyses have been performed through both interactional data (with 2044 times of interaction and a total of 167 hours of usage) and quality of robot experience survey. The descriptive analysis of interactional data show that the designed socially assistive robot enabled care system has facilitated breaking the technology barrier of people with dementia, positively proving sensory enrichment to participants and provided respires to the participants’ carers. The quality of robot experience survey statistics indicate the participants had positive experience with their robot

Can artificial intelligence separate the wheat from the chaff in systematic reviews of health economic articles?

The aim of this analysis was to investigate the performance of ASReview for screening titles and abstracts when performing a systematic literature review of health economic evaluations. To do this, the simulation function within ASReview was used to determine the order in which articles were presented to the reviewer. Moreover, two types of stopping rules were applied on screening with ASReview, and the accuracy and efficiency were determined using retrospective analysis. The analyis is described in detail in: Oude Wolcherink MJ, Pouwels XGLV, van Dijk SHB, Doggen CJM, Koffijberg H. Health Economic Research Can artificial intelligence separate the wheat from the chaff in systematic reviews of health economic articles? Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research. Augustus 2023 doi: 10.1080/14737167.2023.2234639. The zip.file includes data used for the analysis described above and scripts to run the analysis to generate the figures shown in the article above. You are also able to adapt the scripts to perform your own analysis on your own data. Please, read the README file careful and follow the steps indicated there

When technology cares for people with dementia:A critical review using neuropsychological rehabilitation as a conceptual framework

Clinicians and researchers have become increasingly interested in the potential of technology in assisting persons with dementia (PwD). However, several issues have emerged in relation to how studies have conceptualized who the main technology user is (PwD/carer), how technology is used (as compensatory, environment modification, monitoring or retraining tool), why it is used (i.e., what impairments and/or disabilities are supported) and what variables have been considered as relevant to support engagement with technology. In this review we adopted a Neuropsychological Rehabilitation perspective to analyse 253 studies reporting on technological solutions for PwD. We analysed purposes/uses, supported impairments and disabilities and how engagement was considered. Findings showed that the most frequent purposes of technology use were compensation and monitoring, supporting orientation, sequencing complex actions and memory impairments in a wide range of activities. The few studies that addressed the issue of engagement with technology considered how the ease of use, social appropriateness, level of personalization, dynamic adaptation and carers' mediation allowed technology to adapt to PWD's and carers' preferences and performance. Conceptual and methodological tools emerged as outcomes of the analytical process, representing an important contribution to understanding the role of technologies to increase PwD's wellbeing and orient future research.University of Huddersfield, under grants URF301-01 and URF506-01