Inter-organization cooperation for ambient assisted living

Abstract

In the last years we have witnessed to a substantial increase on the number of people in need of care services, especially among the elderly, a phenomenon related to population ageing. However, this is becoming not exclusive of the elderly, as diseases like obesity, diabetes, and blood pressure have been increasing amongst young adults. This is a new reality which needs to be dealt by the healthcare sector, specifically the public one. Given these new scenarios, the importance of finding new and cost-effective ways for health care delivery are of particular relevance, especially when it is believed that these new patients should not be removed from their natural, day-today life, environment. The evolution of the, so called, new technologies may pay here a very important role as they may become part of the solution for this new problematic. Actually, they are already been used as, in recent years, several projects have raised in this relatively new area of work. These projects, although legitimate ones, were essential for delineating a path to pursue for others to come, as they were in some case, very simple ones (e.g. panic buttons), and, especially, reactive ones. In this paper, we are going to present how we are trying to evolve these projects a step further, through the introduction of proactiveness as a key factor, taking advantage of "new", as in applied to this areas, techniques of decision making, idea generation, argumentation and data quality, applied, not only to the in transit information, but also to the one provided by the several intervenient as well as themselves. In order to be able to pursue this delineated path, a new approach for knowledge representation, reasoning, and even for problem solving is proposed. To achieve these goals, the VirtualECare environment is presented, together with its sustaining infrastructure and architecture. Particular attention will be paidto how it may be used to simulate a virtual Assisted Living Environment in order to, later, better monitor real ones, attending to its customers' needs.

Multimodal behavioral analysis for non-invasive stress detection

“…In this paper a context-aware VE for conflict resolution is proposed, based on an Ambient Assisted Living approach (Novais et al, 2010). We leverage on the UMCourt Conflict Resolution Platform and extend it with an intermediate layer that receives sensory information and converts it into meaningful information about the context of interaction.…”

Developing an Individualized Survival Prediction Model for Rectal Cancer

“…Overall, the developed model was able to present a good performance with fewer features than the existing approaches. As future work we intend to construct a mobile application to make both models (colon and rectal cancer prediction models) available to the health care community and to integrate it in settings of ambient assisted living and group decision making [14,12]. In order to have the tool always updated and adapted to new patients, an on-line learning scheme is being prepared.…”

Moving towards a new paradigm of creation, dissemination, and application of computer-interpretable medical knowledge

“…Particularly when we imagine a scenario in which a patient leaves the hospital and has to proceed treatment at home. If an AAL system such as the VirtualECare, described in (Novais et al 2010), is set up with a CIG module connected to the health care institution application, then the patient can continue the guideline execution started at the previous location when he is home. This would mean that the reach of CIGs would stretch far beyond health care institutions.…”