LaCasa: Location And Context-Aware Safety Assistant

Hoey, Jesse; Yang, Xiao Guang; Quintana, Eduardo Martín; Favela, Jesús

doi:10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2012.248642

Cited by 31 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…The usage of multitouch display tables for physical and cognitive rehabilitation is a key area in this regard. We are also exploring mobile applications for persons with dementia, specifically to assist in wayfinding for persons who wander [Hoey et al 2012].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

People, sensors, decisions

Hoey

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et al. 2012

ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst.

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The ratio of healthcare professionals to care recipients is dropping at an alarming rate, particularly for the older population. It is estimated that the number of persons with Alzheimer's disease, for example, will top 100 million worldwide by the year 2050 [Alzheimer's Disease International 2009]. It will become harder and harder to provide needed health services to this population of older adults. Further, patients are becoming more aware and involved in their own healthcare decisions. This is creating a void in which technology has an increasingly important role to play as a tool to connect providers with recipients. Examples of interactive technologies range from telecare for remote regions to computer games promoting fitness in the home. Currently, such technologies are developed for specific applications and are difficult to modify to suit individual user needs. The future potential economic and social impact of technology in the healthcare field therefore lies in our ability to make intelligent devices that are customizable by healthcare professionals and their clients, that are adaptive to users over time, and that generalize across tasks and environments.A wide application area for technology in healthcare is for assistance and monitoring in the home. As the population ages, it becomes increasingly dependent on chronic healthcare, such as assistance for tasks of everyday life (washing, cooking, dressing), medication taking, nutrition, and fitness. This article will present a summary of work over the past decade on the development of intelligent systems that provide assistance to persons with cognitive disabilities. These systems are unique in that they are all built using a common framework, a decision-theoretic model for general-purpose assistance in the home. In this article, we will show how this type of general model can be applied to a range of assistance tasks, including prompting for activities of daily living, assistance for art therapists, and stroke rehabilitation. This model is a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) that can be customized by end-users, that can integrate complex sensor information, and that can adapt over time. These three characteristics of the POMDP model will allow for increasing uptake and long-term efficiency and robustness of technology for assistance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

People, sensors, decisions

Hoey

Boutilier

Poupart

et al. 2012

ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst.

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“…The frequency and manner in which a person wanders is highly influenced by the person's background and contextual factors specific to the situation. We developed a POMDP model for a mobile application called "LaCasa" [11], [26] that estimates the risk faced by the PwD and decides on the appropriate action to take, such as prompting the PwD or calling the caregiver. The model was designed and instantiated using our technique for engineering POMDPs [27].…”

Section: A Lacasa Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy Efficient Execution of POMDP Policies

Grzes

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Yang³

et al. 2015

IEEE Trans. Cybern.

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Abstract-Recent advances in planning techniques for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have focused on online search techniques and offline point-based value iteration. While these techniques allow practitioners to obtain policies for fairly large problems, they assume that a nonnegligible amount of computation can be done between each decision point. In contrast, the recent proliferation of mobile and embedded devices has lead to a surge of applications that could benefit from state-of-the-art planning techniques if they can operate under severe constraints on computational resources. To that effect, we describe two techniques to compile policies into controllers that can be executed by a mere table lookup at each decision point. The first approach compiles policies induced by a set of alpha vectors (such as those obtained by point-based techniques) into approximately equivalent controllers, while the second approach performs a simulation to compile arbitrary policies into approximately equivalent controllers. We also describe an approach to compress controllers by removing redundant and dominated nodes, often yielding smaller and yet better controllers. Further compression and higher value can sometimes be obtained by considering stochastic controllers. The compilation and compression techniques are demonstrated on benchmark problems as well as a mobile application to help persons with Alzheimer's to way-find. The battery consumption of several POMDP policies is compared against finite-state controllers learned using methods introduced in this paper. Experiments performed on the Nexus 4 phone show that finite-state controllers are the least battery consuming POMDP policies.Index Terms-Energy-efficiency, finite-state controllers, knowledge compilation, Markov decision processes, mobile applications, partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs).

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“…Context aware systems have been used in different domains in order to guarantee end-users' safety and quality of life [1,2]. In some cases, it involves a remote monitoring and prompt intervention in dangerous and critical situations [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%