Virtual Caregiver: An Ambient-Aware Elderly Monitoring System

Abstract

The growing number of elderly population at home and abroad necessitates improved approaches to elderly care provision. Elders, often with cognitive and physical impairment, need assistance in their activities of daily living (ADLs), which is usually provided by human caregivers. As the demand for caregivers assistance increases, the shortage of traditional care resources becomes obvious. In this paper, we present the Virtual Caregiver (ViCare) framework that supports a human caregiver to monitor continuously the elderly by being aware of their surroundings. The ViCare system attempts to understand the elderly persons activities and contexts based on the data captured by the sensors placed in their environment and dynamically decides what services to provide them or whether there is a need to interrupt human caregiver depending on the type of activities. It not only minimizes the cognitive load of the human caregiver but also provides a seamless assistance to the elderly toward their improved health and well-being in their living environment. We conducted the experiments in an instrumented home environment and obtained positive results in terms of the satisfaction of the elderly, interaction event handling, caregivers acceptance and their engagement.

Mobile-health: A review of current state in 2015

“…This service improves and provides better healthcare services to patients with cognitive disorders, such as, Alzheimer or mild cognitive impairment. Regarding the elderly people that constantly need support end health services, Hossain and Ahmed proposed a support system for caregivers in a assisted living environment [27]. This context-aware system, called ViCare, interprets the elderly activities based on data captured by several sensors placed in their environment and decides what health or other services should be provided.…”

Safety-enabled restful messaging in Ambient-Assisted Living

“…It's a long pathway of communicating messages that change in content, format, type, and size. For the wellbeing of elderly people, it is critical to detect emergency situation and send alert messages in real-time [3,12]. Hence, AAL systems are considered as safety-critical systems that should provide safe, reliable and trusted messaging services when transferring sensor data and/or decisions from one unit to another.…”

An Ambient Assisted Living Technology Platform for Informal Carers of the Elderly - iCarer

“…In addition, many older adults prefer to age in their own home rather than in an assisted living facility, even though they require long-term care due to diseases associated with ageing and assistance in their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) [2]. Therefore, a significant increase in care responsibilities, which is typically performed by family and friends, appears and implies a need for innovative support approaches for family members and their carers.…”