Towards a Collaborative Model to Assist People with Disabilities and the Elderly People in Smart Assistive Cities

Abstract

People with disabilities and the elderly face difficulties to fulfill their accessibility needs in their daily life routines, mainly when they have an emergency demanding speedy and specific assistance. This article proposes the SafeFollowing, a collaborative model to help people with disabilities and the elderly in smart assistive cities. The main contribution of this work is the specification of a decentralized model of ubiquitous accessibility, which involves public agents and volunteers to attend the users’ requests. SafeFollowing also allows the use of police vehicles mapping, in order to provide a specific follow-up in adverse situations of daily life. The model was validated through experiments in real case scenarios by 14 public agents and 11 elderly and people with disabilities. The results showed that 100% of evaluators (users and agents) stated that the model was useful and 82% of users and 100% of agents considered that SafeFollowing was easy to use. The experiments also allowed the learning of 5 relevant lessons on technological and usability aspects of SafeFollowing that are recorded in this article.

Security Mechanisms of a Mobile Health Application for Promoting Physical Activity among Older Adults

“…Given that smart cities' infrastructures are public and easily accessible, it is important to robust security mechanisms to guarantee the privacy, integrity, and confidentiality of personal data. Even though many research studies identify privacy as a significant issue in smart cities, there is evidence [24] that the issues arising from the use of personal mobile and wearable sensors by applications addressing the mobility of older adults in smart cities (e.g., [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]), and for promoting healthy lifestyles in particular [17,18], are under-researched. Additionally, the privacy issues related to the gap among the digital competences of older adults and the privacy management requirements of mobile applications and related problems have not been conveniently solved yet [16].…”

“…Despite the importance of data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality, the smart city developments aiming to promote the mobility and physical activity of older adults do not conveniently address these questions [24], as can be observed in various studies [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Therefore, the present study aimed to contribute with solutions to surpass this gap.…”

“…The use of smart technologies is increasingly considered an important mean to promote active ageing [6,7]. Therefore, many researchers aimed to develop new services based on information technologies (IT), such as ambient assisted living (AAL) [8], or smart cities' applications to promote age-friendly cities and communities [9] by facilitating the mobility of older adults [10][11][12][13][14][15][16] or by promoting healthy lifestyles (i.e., physical activity) [17,18].…”

Analysis of Driving Factors in the Intention to Use the Virtual Nursing Home for the Elderly: A Modified UTAUT Model in the Chinese Context

“…Studies suggest that technology has the potential for improving life quality for the elderly, especially within smart cities. This includes collaborative models involving public agents and volunteers and intelligent models for accommodating older adults with disabilities in smart city environments [ 1 , 2 ]. Furthermore, technologies like LoRa and MQTT have been explored for older adult monitoring to prevent accidents [ 3 ].…”

Towards ubiquitous requirements engineering through recommendations based on context histories

“…The classical works of Weiser (1999) , Satyanarayanan (2001) , and Dey, Abowd & Salber (2001) defined the ubiquitous computing and context-aware computing. Since then, these concepts have been applied in different knowledge areas such in health ( Vianna & Barbosa, 2014 ; Vianna & Barbosa, 2019 ; Dias et al, 2020 ; Petry et al, 2020 ; Bavaresco et al, 2020 ), well-being ( Vianna, Barbosa & Pittoli, 2017a ), competence management ( Rosa et al, 2015 ), learning ( Barbosa et al, 2011 ; Wagner, Barbosa & Barbosa, 2014 ; Barbosa et al, 2014 ; Larentis et al, 2020 ), commerce ( Barbosa et al, 2016 ), accessibility ( Tavares et al, 2016 ; Barbosa et al, 2018 ), Smart Cities ( Rolim et al, 2016 ; Orrego & Barbosa, 2019 ; Matos et al, 2021 ), and agriculture ( De Souza et al, 2019 ; Bhanu, Reddy & Hanumanthappa, 2019 ; Helfer et al, 2020 ). The application of ubiquitous computing in project management coined the term Ubiquitous Project Management ( Filippetto et al, 2020 ).…”