Everyday Functioning Benefits from an Assisted Living Platform amongst Frail Older Adults and Their Caregivers

Ambient assisted living technologies (AAL) are regarded as a promising solution to support aging in place. Yet, their efficacy has to be demonstrated in terms of benefits for independent living and for work conditions of caregivers. Hence, the purpose of this study was to assess the benefits of a multi-task AAL platform for both Frail older Individuals (FIs) and professional caregivers with respect to everyday functioning and caregiver burden. In this context, a 6-month field study involved 32 FIs living at home (half of them were equipped by the platform and the remaining half were not, as a control condition) and their caregivers. Everyday functioning measures were reported by frail participants and caregivers. Self-reported burden measures of caregiver were also collected. The main results showed that the caregiver's estimates of everyday functioning of equipped participants were unchanged across time, while they decreased for the control participants. Also, a reduction of self-reported objective burden was obtained after 6 months of AAL intervention for the equipped group, compared to the control group. Overall, these results highlighted the potential of AAL as a relevant environmental support for preventing both functional losses in FIs and objective burden professional caregiver

Perceived Needs for Assistive Technologies in older adults and their caregivers

International audienceThere is a growing interest for Assistive Technologies (AT) for aging in place. However, acceptance and adoption of AT in older adults remain problematic. This study investigates the perceived AT needs for three domains (everyday activities, safety and social participation) among 50 community-dwelling older adults and their caregivers. Our results indicate that the perceived AT needs are higher in caregivers than old adults, and both safety and social linking are need domains more critical than that of everyday activities. Importantly, for the first time, we demonstrate that older adults formulate their AT needs irrespective of their cognitive or physical losses while caregivers formulate AT needs according to losses exhibited by an older adult. Precisely, AT needs expressed by caregivers are related to cognitive decline for the domain of everyday activities and to physical decline for the domains of safety and social linking. Overall, this reveals the importance of an peer-evaluation by caregivers or family when evaluating AT need; moreover, we could suggest educational programs on aging-related limitations for older participants and thus enhancing the AT acceptance and adoption

Projet DomAssist

Article diffusé dans la dépêche électronique de la délégation ministérielle à l'accessibilitéSelon l'INSEE, les personnes de plus de 60 ans représenteront un habitant sur trois en France, en 2050, contre un habitant sur cinq, en 2005.Dans ce contexte, le maintien des âgés à leur domicile est devenu un enjeu médical, économique et sociétal majeur. Vieillir au domicile peut être compromis, du fait, d'une part des pertes d'autonomie associées au vieillissement , et d'autre part, du fardeau des aidants, notamment les risques psychosociaux encourus par l'entourage ou les professionnels bien trop ou mal sollicités dans leurs missions d'accompagnement de la personne âgée en perte d'autonomie. Parmi les solutions envisagées pour soutenir la personne âgée et ses aidants, les technologies numériques (appelées aussi gérontotechnologies) sont aujourd'hui identifiées comme les plus prometteuses et,elles sont donc aujourd'hui lecentre d'intérêts de nombreux programmes de recherche et sont également les invitées privilégiées de la Silver Economie. En effet, ces technologies ont le potentiel d'améliorer la vie quotidienne des personnes âgées et de leur famille dans de nombreux domaines, tels que la santé, la mobilité, les activités domestiques, ou encore la communication et les activités de loisirs. Cependant, comme en témoignent les études sur les usages des technologies chez les âgés, il reste encore un long chemin à parcourir pour que les gérontotechnologies soient utilisables et accessibles par la majorité de la population âgée.C'est dans ce contexte que le projet de recherche DomAssist a vu le jour, et dont l'originalité est d'associer des compétences scientifiques et professionnelles multi-domaines(chercheurs en informatique et en sciences cognitives, Professionnels de l'accompagnement médico-social) afin d'élaborer un assistant domiciliaire dédié aux besoins spécifiques des personnes âgées au domicile

Besoins d'assistance technologique par des personnes âgées et leurs aidants

National audienceIl existe un intérêt croissant pour les technologies d'assistance (TA) permettant le maintien à domicile des âgés. Cependant, l'acceptabilité et l'adoption de ces TA restent problématiques. Cette étude s'intéresse au besoin ressenti en terme de TA dans trois domaines d'assistance (activités quotidiennes, sécurité et lien social) chez 50 personnes âgées et leurs aidants. Nos résultats indiquent que les besoins ressentis sont plus importants de la part des aidants que des personnes âgées. De plus, pour la première fois, nous avons démontré que les âgés formulent leurs besoins en TA indépendamment de leurs difficultés physiques et cognitives, alors que les aidants énoncent un besoin en adéquation avec les difficultés des âgés qu'ils accompagnent. Globalement, ces résultats mettent en avant l'intérêt d'une hétéro-évaluation par la famille ou les aidants pour identifier les besoins ressentis en TA pour le maintien à domicile des âgés

A Unifying Notification System To Scale Up Assistive Services

International audienceAging creates needs for assistive technology to support all activities of daily living (meal preparation, dressing, social participation, stove monitoring, etc.). These needs are mostly addressed by a silo-based approach that requires a new assis-tive service (e.g., a reminder system, a pill prompter) to be acquired for every activity to be supported. In practice, these services manifest their silo-based nature in their user interactions , and more specifically, in the heterogeneity of their notification system. This heterogeneity incurs a cognitive cost that prevents scaling up assistive services and compromises adoption by older adults. This paper presents an approach to scaling up the combination of technology-based, assistive services by proposing a unifying notification system. To do so, (1) we propose a decomposition of assistive services to expose their needs in notification; (2) we introduce a notification framework, allowing heterogeneous assistive services to homogeneously notify users; (3) we present how this notification framework is carried out in practice for an assisted living platform. We successfully applied our approach to a range of existing and new assistive services. We used our notification framework to implement an assistive platform that combines a variety of assistive services. This platform has been deployed and used 24/7 at the home of 15 older adults for up to 6 months. This study provides empirical evidence of the effectiveness and learnability of the notification system of our platform, irrespective of the cognitive and sensory resources of the user. Additional results show that our assisted living platform achieved high user acceptance and satisfaction. Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different copyright statements: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced

Self Determination-Based Design To Achieve Acceptance of Assisted Living Technologies For Older Adults

Accepted for publication in the journal Computers In Human BehaviorInternational audienceProviding technological support to assist older adults in their daily activities is a promising approach to aging in place. However, acceptance is critical when technologies are embedded in the user's life. Recently, Lee et al. established a connection between acceptance and motivation. They approached motivation via the Self-Determination Theory (SDT): the capacity to make choices and to take decisions. This paper leverages SDT to promote a new design style for gerontechnologies that consists of principles and requirements. We applied our approach to develop an assisted living platform, which was used to conduct a six-month field study with 34 older adults. We show that self-determination is a determining factor of technology acceptance. Furthermore, our platform improved the self-determination of equipped participants, compared to the control group, suggesting that our approach is effective. As such, SDT opens up new opportunities for improving the design process of geron-technologies

Une assistance numérique pour les personnes âgées: le projet DomAssist

Publié dans Interstices, revue de culture scientifique en ligneApporter une aide numérique pour maintenir à domicile les personnes âgées en perte d’autonomie et accompagnerleurs aidants : c’est l’objectif de la plateforme DomAssis

Role of cognitive resources on everyday functioning among oldest-old physically frail

International audienceBackground : Everyday functioning becomes a challenge with aging, particularly among frail oldest-old adults. Several factors have been identified as influencing everyday activities realization, including physical and cognitive functioning. However, the influence of cognitive resources as a compensatory factor in the context of physical frailty deserves further consideration.Aims :This study aims to investigate in older adults physically frail the possible compensatory role of cognitive resources to perform everyday tasks.Methods :Two groups of community-dwelling old participants (n = 26 per group) matched for their age and cognitive resources, have been drawn according to their level of physical functioning. Two measures of everyday functioning have been assessed: one self-reported by the participant (the IADL scale) and one performance-based measure (the TIADL tasks).Results: Participants performed equally the TIADL tasks irrespective of their physical condition. Contrariwise, participants with low physical functioning reported more everyday difficulties than their counterparts with a high level of physical functioning. Additionally, regressions analyses revealed differential influence of cognitive resources on performance and reported measures of everyday functioning.Discussion : Our data suggests that cognitive resources are more strongly involved in the performance-based IADL measure in situation of physical frailty. Additionally, for participants with low physical functioning, lower cognitive resources are associated with more perceived difficulties in everyday life.Conclusion: These results highlight the compensatory role of cognitive resources in physically frail older adults, and suggest that an overestimation of everyday difficulties compared to performance on IADL tasks is an early indicator of physical decline and cognitive compensation

Verification of Daily Activities of Older Adults: A Simple, Non-Intrusive, Low-Cost Approach

International audienceThis paper presents an approach to verifying the activities of daily living of older adults at their home. We verify activities, instead of inferring them, because our monitoring approach is driven by routines, initially sketched by users in their environment. Monitoring is supported by a lightweight sensor infrastructure, comprising non-intrusive, low-cost, wireless devices. Verification is performed by applying a simple formula to sensor log data, for each activity of interest. The result value determines whether an activity has been performed.We have conducted an experimental study to validate our approach. To do so, four participants have been monitored during five days at their home, equipped with sensors. When applied to the log data, our formulas were able to automatically verify that a list of activities were performed. They produced the same interpretations, using Signal Detection Theory, as a third party, manually analyzing the log data

Evaluation of a virtual agent to train medical students conducting psychiatric interviews for diagnosing major depressive disorders

Background: A psychiatric diagnosis involves the physician's ability to create an empathic interaction with the patient in order to accurately extract semiology (i.e., clinical manifestations). Virtual patients (VPs) can be used to train these skills but need to be evaluated in terms of accuracy, and to be perceived positively by users. Methods: We recruited 35 medical students who interacted in a 35-min psychiatric interview with a VP simulating major depressive disorders. Semiology extraction, verbal and non-verbal empathy were measured objectively during the interaction. The students were then debriefed to collect their experience with the VP. Results: The VP was able to simulate the conduction of a psychiatric interview realistically, and was effective to discriminate students depending on their psychiatric knowledge. Results suggest that students managed to keep an emotional distance during the interview and show the added value of emotion recognition software to measure empathy in psychiatry training. Students provided positive feedback regarding pedagogic usefulness, realism and enjoyment in the interaction. Limitations: Our sample was relatively small. As a first prototype, the measures taken by the VP would need improvement (subtler empathic questions, levels of difficulty). The face-tracking technique might induce errors in detecting non-verbal empathy. Conclusion: This study is the first to simulate a realistic psychiatric interview and to measure both skills needed by future psychiatrists: semiology extraction and empathic communication. Results provide evidence that VPs are acceptable by medical students, and highlight their relevance to complement existing training and evaluation tools in the field of affective disorders.Bordeaux Region Aquitaine Initiative for NeurosciencePhénotypage humain et réalité virtuelleInitiative d'excellence de l'Université de Bordeau