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A hybrid matchmaking approach in the ambient assisted living domain
During the recent years, several new Information and Communication Technology solutions have been developed in order to meet the increasing needs of elderly with cognitive impairments and support their autonomous living. Most of these solutions follow a human-centred paradigm that aims to provide users with personalised services according to their needs by also ensuring their safety with mechanisms that can automatically trigger appropriate actions in situations where there may be a risk for an elderly. The present paper presents a hybrid matchmaking approach that uses efficiently both a rule-based and a statistical matchmaker in order to (a) propose ambient assisted living services to the end-users, based on their role, status and context of use and (b) identify and resolve problematic cases by automatically selecting the most proper set of services to be called in a single or combined manner
INLIFE - independent living support functions for the elderly : technology and pilot overview
In this paper, we present the European H2020 project INLIFE (INdependent LIving support Functions for the Elderly). The project brought together 20 partners from nine countries with the goal of integrating into a common ICT platform a range of technologies intended to assist community-dwelling older people with cognitive impairment. The majority of technologies existed prior to INLIFE and a key goal was to bring them together in one place along with a number of new applications to provide a comprehensive set of services. The range of INLIFE services fell into four broad areas: Independent Living Support, Travel Support, Socialization and Communication Support and Caregiver Support. These included security applications, services to facilitate interactions with formal and informal caregivers, multilingual conversation support, web-based physical exercises, teleconsultations, and support for transport navigation. In total, over 2900 people participated in the project; they included elderly adults with cognitive impairment, informal caregivers, healthcare professionals, and other stakeholders. The aim of the study was to assess whether there was improvement/stabilization of cognitive/emotional/physical functioning, as well as overall well-being and quality of life of those using the INLIFE services, and to assess user acceptance of the platform and individual services. The results confirm there is a huge interest and appetite for technological services to support older adults living with cognitive impairment in the community. Different services attracted different amounts of use and evaluation with some proving extremely popular while others less so. The findings provide useful information on the ways in which older adults and their families, health and social care services and other stakeholders wish to access technological services, what sort of services they are seeking, what sort of support they need to access services, and how these services might be funded