Reflective assistance for eldercare environments

Abstract

Reflective assistance is concerned with the construction of flexible 'smart' systems that control the eldercare environment, adapting the functioning to the needs of the individual in real-time. In order to achieve this goal, systems must be capable of monitoring the behaviour of the elderly people and responding to dynamic changes in their performance, physical and psychological situation. This paper describes how reflective approach can be used to design and develop a home environment that offers medicare, rehabilitation exercises and improved comfort of elderly inhabitants

What Characterizes Safety of Ambient Assisted Living Technologies?

“…Seven papers reported on concrete AAL applications [7][8][9][10][11][12][13], see Table 1. Eleven papers reported rather on AAL in general or were reviews [2,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. General topics related to safety in AAL systems comprised: ethical issues [23], use, adoption and acceptance [17,[19][20][21][22], impact of AAL on quality of life [16], needs and behavior related to AAL [2,15], AAL design considerations [14] and safety analysis [18].…”

“…Eleven papers reported rather on AAL in general or were reviews [2,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. General topics related to safety in AAL systems comprised: ethical issues [23], use, adoption and acceptance [17,[19][20][21][22], impact of AAL on quality of life [16], needs and behavior related to AAL [2,15], AAL design considerations [14] and safety analysis [18]. Ten papers introduced a framework or architecture [6,10,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34].…”

Evolving requirements in patient-centered software

“…Current user-centered design techniques and traditional software engineering both address important considerations of developing software that meets end users' needs, but fall short when addressing the need for adaptation and evolution of software in an ever-changing environment. Previous work that has addressed the adaptability of software for eldercare has focused on developing systems that reflect on their use and adapt to better serve their users [22] or proposed an approach that makes use of medical knowledge, patients' physiological and behavioral data, and environmental conditions to reconfigure the software architecture of a patient-centered software system [15]. These approaches address some of the Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”