An ambient assisted living system for dementia patients

Abstract

Dementia is a major health and social care challenge of today and the near future as a result of increased human lifespan. Currently, there is no therapeutic solution for dementia, but a solution for managing the wandering behavior of dementia patients can be provided by an ambient assisted living system. In this paper, the design and implementation of iCarus, which is an intelligent ambient assisted living system for dealing with wandering behavior in early stages of dementia, is described. The aim of iCarus is to provide independent living for elderly people and a cost-effective way of monitoring them. iCarus is a zone-based system that forms a safety net. When a wandering episode occurs, rule-based context reasoning is employed to determine the actions that are to be executed. These actions include warning the patient, navigating the patient to his home, sending notifications to the caregiver(s), and initiating a real-time tracking session for the caregiver and the emergency service. Also, caregivers are able to construct their own rules and extend the functionality of the system according to their own needs. Constructing new rules is done by an innovative user interface. As a case study, iCarus is described and evaluated with a scenario. In order to evaluate the usability of iCarus, a questionnaire was administered after the users tried the system. The results were then statistically analyzed and reported.

Methodological Quality of User-Centered Usability Evaluation of Ambient Assisted Living Solutions: A Systematic Literature Review

“…However, in this review, many studies reported on the utilization of ad-hoc instruments. Examples of poor practices from a methodological quality point of view are the use of questionnaires developed purposively for a study without any attempt to assess its validity by an expert panel or against a gold standard and without specifying the questions and the process of development (e.g., [35,36,38,39,41,49,55,63,73]), extracting some questions from previously validated instruments compromising their validity and reliability (e.g., [53]), or assessing reliability but not validity (e.g., [52,60]). Ensuring validity is ensuring that an instrument is assessing what is supposed to be assessed and ensuring reliability is ensuring that the instruments give consistent results across repeated assessments.…”

“…Ensuring validity is ensuring that an instrument is assessing what is supposed to be assessed and ensuring reliability is ensuring that the instruments give consistent results across repeated assessments. Although there might be reasons to develop or adapt a scale/questionnaire, its validity and reliability must be evidenced [77], which was not the case of the questionnaires used in 37% of the studies included in this review (i.e., [35,36,38,39,41,49,52,53,55,60,63,73]). The finding that SUS was the most commonly usability scale reported in the included studies (i.e., [43,45,54,56,58,59,61,[64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71]74]) is in line with a previous review on user-centered usability evaluation [78] and it suggests that this is a widely accepted instrument, usually regarded as a golden standard in terms of usability evaluation.…”

“…Each study number of participants varied from four (i.e., studies [37,42]) to 153 (i.e., study [45]). Two studies did not include any information related to the age of the participants [60,72]. In turn, six studies did not report the mean age of the participants, although in five of them participants were at least 65 years old [32,39,48,55,67], while in another study, participants were at least 50 years old [66].…”

“…In terms of publication types, ten studies were published in conference proceedings [31,32,34,35,38,40,42,61,62,72] and 34 studies were published in scientific journals [33,36,37,39,41,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71]73,74].…”

“…Concerning the publication years, the included studies were published between 2008 (i.e., one study [31]) and 2020 (i.e., five studies [70][71][72][73][74]). The diagram in Figure 2 demonstrates a trend towards an increasing number of publications, and more than twothirds of the studies (i.e., 30 studies ) were published in the last five years and more than one-third of the studies (i.e., 15 studies [60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74]) were published in the last two years. The Figure 3 represents the distribution of the included studies by country.…”