The integration of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) frameworks with Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) has proven useful for monitoring and assisting older adults in their own home. However, the difficulties associated with long-term deployments in real-world complex environments are still highly under-explored. In this work, we first present the MoveCare system, an unobtrusive platform that, through the integration of a SAR into an AAL framework, aimed to monitor, assist and provide social, cognitive, and physical stimulation in the own houses of elders living alone and at risk of falling into frailty. We then focus on the evaluation and analysis of a long-term pilot campaign of more than 300 weeks of usages. We evaluated the system’s acceptability and feasibility through various questionnaires and empirically assessed the impact of the presence of an assistive robot by deploying the system with and without it. Our results provide strong empirical evidence that Socially Assistive Robots integrated with monitoring and stimulation platforms can be successfully used for long-term support to older adults. We describe how the robot’s presence significantly incentivised the use of the system, but slightly lowered the system’s overall acceptability. Finally, we emphasise that real-world long-term deployment of SARs introduces a significant technical, organisational, and logistical overhead that should not be neglected nor underestimated in the pursuit of long-term robust systems. We hope that the findings and lessons learned from our work can bring value towards future long-term real-world and widespread use of SARs.
Telerehabilitation can offer prolonged rehabilitation for patients with stroke after being discharged from the hospital, whilst remote diagnostics may reduce the frequency of the outpatient services required. Here, we compared a novel telerehabilitation system for virtual reality-supported balance training with balance training with only a standing frame and with conventional therapy in the hospital. The proposed low-cost experimental system for balance training enabling multiple home systems, real-time tracking of task's performance and different views of captured data with balance training, consists of a standing frame equipped with a tilt sensor, a low-cost computer, display, and internet connection. Goal-based tasks for balance training in the virtual environment proved motivating for the participating individuals. The physiotherapist, located in the remote healthcare center, could remotely adjust the level of complexity and difficulty or preview the outcomes and instructions with the application on the mobile smartphone. Patients using the virtual reality-supported balance training showed an improvement in the task performance time of 45% and number of collisions of 68%, showing significant improvements in the Berg Balance Scale, Timed 'Up and Go', and 10 m Walk Test. The clinical outcomes were not significantly different from balance training with only the standing frame or conventional therapy. The proposed telerehabilitation can facilitate the physiotherapists' work and thus enable rehabilitation to a larger number of patients after release from the hospital because it requires less time and infrequent presence of the clinical staff. However, a comprehensive clinical evaluation is required to confirm the applicability of the concept.
Demand-side flexibility management is a key enabler of the transformation towards the high penetration of renewable energy resources. We present a flexibility-management system called Flex4Grid, which is designed to provide a low-cost solution for residential consumers wishing to participate in power-grid balancing. The Flex4Grid system continuously forecasts the need for flexibility in a power grid and informs consumers about the flexibility-management periods. Consumers can provide their flexibility to an aggregator in exchange for a reward, which depends on the selected incentive scheme. The automation of the flexibility-management events is provided by interfacing with devices and the system via the Z-Wave and open platform communication unified architecture (OPC UA) technologies. The Flex4Grid system has been deployed in three pilots in Slovenia and Germany. A large-scale pilot in Celje, Slovenia, with 1047 participants, was used to collect statistical data regarding how consumers participate in the flexibility-management events. A critical peak-pricing incentive scheme was used in the Celje pilot. The smaller German pilots with a total of 185 participants were used for testing the technical capabilities of the system. User-satisfaction surveys were performed in all three pilots. The results indicate that the proposed approach is appropriate for engaging consumers in flexibility-management events. On average, the pilots' participants reduced their load by 10% during a peak event. The overall scores of the user-satisfaction survey were 3.4 and 3.9 on a 5-point Likert scale for the German and Slovenian pilots, respectively. These are good results for a prototype system; however, improvements to the stability and usability of the system are required.
Abstract. Due to the complexity and size of service oriented GRIDs, it is essential that GRID systems should be autonomous i.e. a self-management system is needed. This paper identifies the requirements of such a selfmanagement GRID system and the required supporting services. This paper suggests that these supporting services should be deployed in the form of software modules through programmable techniques. This paper presents a communication protocol for dynamic self-configuration in programmable GRIDs as an example for supporting new network services.
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