Virtual Caregiver: An Ambient-Aware Elderly Monitoring System | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

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 impairme...Show More

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 (HCGs). As the demand for caregiver's assistance increases, the shortage of traditional care resources becomes obvious. In this paper, we present the Virtual Caregiver (ViCare) framework that supports a HCG 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 HCG depending on the type of activities. It not only minimizes the cognitive load of the HCG 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, caregiver's acceptance, and their engagement.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine ( Volume: 16, Issue: 6, November 2012)
Page(s): 1024 - 1031
Date of Publication: 06 June 2012

ISSN Information:

PubMed ID: 22692933

I. Introduction

Due to the huge number of elderly population worldwide, many health and government organizations are focusing on their quality of life—from medical, social, and physiological points of view. According to the World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/), there will be 1.2 billion people aged 60 or above by 2025 and 2 billion by 2050. So it is utmost important that we continue working with these groups of population, who are somehow dependent and vulnerable in different aspects.

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References

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