TV-Based Caring Videophone System for the Elderly in the Smart Home Environment

Abstract

A novel videophone system for the elderly-care application is proposed. Based on the detailed analysis of the elderly’s physical and psychological characteristics, a TV-based caring videophone system for the elderly is developed: an embedded multimedia device is designed to implement the interactive video and audio processing and IP-based communication, in which TV is adopted as the display terminal to achieve a low-cost but high-quality service. Considering the user’s convenience, many personalized designs, such as photo-based address book, photo-click-dialing, and touch pad based remote controller, are developed to make the proposed videophone system more intuitive and easy to use for the elderly. Based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms, an evaluation model is also developed with the data collected from the embedded multimedia device. It is useful to evaluate the physical and psychological health of the elderly.

Enabling active and healthy ageing decision support systems with the smart collection of TV usage patterns

“…Older people show an affinity for TV watching for various reasons such as companionship, information source, entertainment and establishment of daily rituals. TV usage patterns such as extended TV watching time, TV programme types and watching period time within day or night [20, 21]. On the basis of our preliminary analysis and results, there seems to be a significant correlation among TV usage time and mental health, as measured by experts.…”

“…While this system can be used to measure the usage of various household electronic devices, they report accurate measuring of television usage. Shen et al [21] have developed a low‐cost embedded multimedia terminal in order to turn a conventional TV to a smart communication channel. This extended TV device was able to gather information related to TV watching such as the frequency of turning on/off TV (times per day), the time length of each watching TV (minutes) and the used watching channel (quantity per day).…”

Convergence Research Directions in Cognitive Sensor Networks for Elderly Housing Design

“…Other systems of health-related as healthcare or behavior pattern prediction are not implemented. Shen et al [15] propose TV-based videophone system for the elderly in smart home. Because TV does not only come into wide use so that the elderly need to pay more money for the videophone system but also is low cost device with high resolution and large screen which is fit for the elderly, the authors select TV for the videophone system for the elderly.…”

“…Shen et al [15] (i) Propose TV-based videophone system for serving convenience to the elderly at home. (ii) Evaluate physical and psychological health of the elderly based on the frequency and the length of using the system.…”

“…Shen et al [15] (i) Propose TV-based videophone system for serving convenience to the elderly at home.…”