Early detection of health changes in older adults

Energy Management for Smart Homes—State of the Art

Smart home is a concept that aims to enhance the comfort of residents and facilitate household activities. The smart home is an application of ubiquitous computing which can provide the user with context-aware automated or assistive services in the form of ambient intelligence, remote control of home appliances, or automation. Smart homes attempt to integrate smartness into homes to guarantee the residents’ convenience, safety, and security, while conserving the energy. The capabilities of a smart home in the context of different applications, have been scrutinized for this investigation. Different proposed architectures, protocols, and infrastructures have been taken into consideration. As the data management process is a vital part of a smart home system, many procedures of data collection, storage, and analysis have been surveyed. Methods of data acquisition has also been discussed. Existing challenges, pros, and cons of proposed schemes along with future perspectives of smart homes are identified in this report, which is intended to promote future research directions.

A Behaviour Monitoring System (BMS) for Ambient Assisted Living

Unusual changes in the regular daily mobility routine of an elderly person at home can be an indicator or early symptom of developing health problems. Sensor technology can be utilised to complement the traditional healthcare systems to gain a more detailed view of the daily mobility of a person at home when performing everyday tasks. We hypothesise that data collected from low-cost sensors such as presence and occupancy sensors can be analysed to provide insights on the daily mobility habits of the elderly living alone at home and to detect routine changes. We validate this hypothesis by designing a system that automatically learns the daily room-to-room transitions and permanence habits in each room at each time of the day and generates alarm notifications when deviations are detected. We present an algorithm to process the sensors' data streams and compute sensor-driven features that describe the daily mobility routine of the elderly as part of the developed Behaviour Monitoring System (BMS). We are able to achieve low detection delay with confirmation time that is high enough to convey the detection of a set of common abnormal situations. We illustrate and evaluate BMS with synthetic data, generated by a developed data generator that was designed to mimic different user's mobility profiles at home, and also with a real-life dataset collected from prior research work. Results indicate BMS detects several mobility changes that can be symptoms of common health problems. The proposed system is a useful approach for learning the mobility habits at the home environment, with the potential to detect behaviour changes that occur due to health problems, and therefore, motivating progress toward behaviour monitoring and elder's care.

Assessing older adults' perceptions of sensor data and designing visual displays for ambient environments. An exploratory study

INTRODUCTION

This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on "Using Data from Ambient Assisted Living and Smart Homes in Electronic Health Records".

OBJECTIVES

Our objectives were to: 1) characterize older adult participants' perceived usefulness of in-home sensor data and 2) develop novel visual displays for sensor data from Ambient Assisted Living environments that can become part of electronic health records.

METHODS

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with community-dwelling older adult participants during three and six-month visits. We engaged participants in two design iterations by soliciting feedback about display types and visual displays of simulated data related to a fall scenario. Interview transcripts were analyzed to identify themes related to perceived usefulness of sensor data.

RESULTS

Thematic analysis identified three themes: perceived usefulness of sensor data for managing health; factors that affect perceived usefulness of sensor data and; perceived usefulness of visual displays. Visual displays were cited as potentially useful for family members and health care providers. Three novel visual displays were created based on interview results, design guidelines derived from prior AAL research, and principles of graphic design theory.

CONCLUSIONS

Participants identified potential uses of personal activity data for monitoring health status and capturing early signs of illness. One area for future research is to determine how visual displays of AAL data might be utilized to connect family members and health care providers through shared understanding of activity levels versus a more simplified view of self-management. Connecting informal and formal caregiving networks may facilitate better communication between older adults, family members and health care providers for shared decision-making.

Sensor systems for monitoring functional status in assisted living facility residents

This article provides results of an expert review of data displays for a sensor system used to monitor functional abilities in older adults. The research took place at TigerPlace, an assisted living facility where the sensor system is currently being evaluated. A checklist of 16 heuristic criteria was used to evaluate the sensor data displays, with consideration to the users of the system: residents, their families, and health care providers. Results of this expert review indicate that flexibility and efficiency of use, help and documentation, navigation, and skills were not well developed in the sensor data displays. Conversely, sensor data displays were rated highly for their aesthetic value and the ample visual contrast on the main display components. Through the use of a sensor system, new ways of detecting functional decline in elderly residents of assisted living facilities can be accomplished.

Faux-floor development system for personnel detection using signal scavenging sensors

Motivated by the need to detect motion in elderly people, resulting in falls, we have developed a low cost sensor system using aluminum foil as the sensor of static electricity and electromagnetic energy. But to make this a system we need to amplify the data and use it by displaying the motion or activity of a person. We constructed a faux floor development board to provide an initial pilot test of the idea of using stray electric energy, or as we call it signal scavenging. The foils are placed on the faux floor (in this case a 1 m X 1 m wooden surface) allowing foil excitation from the motion of a test subject. The faux floor is a useful tool allowing testing of different foils, analog and digital electronics circuits and different carpeting. Importantly, even though the system supported a small number of foil sensors its performance characteristics clearly show the excellent detection capability of the system. Testing the timing characteristics resulted in reading the 4 sensors in 3.11 msec, indicating that for even a large system of a few hundred sensors we can poll the foils in sufficient time to detect the motion of people. Our data show true positive rates of 98% and false positive and false negative rates of 2%, a high detection rate. Using the development board has provided much helpful information on the use of signal scavenging for personnel detection.

Signal scavenging for passive monitoring in eldercare technology

Signal scavenging is analogous to energy scavenging: seemingly ubiquitous energy in the environs provides the signal for usage as a personnel sensor. Such energy can be used to detect motion, and most importantly falls. Stray signals can be detected in aluminum foil as voltage differences between touched foil (say by hand) compared to that untouched. Spectrum analysis shows the stray electromagnetic noise signal consists substantially of 60 Hz and its harmonics. Also the signal intensity for both touched and untouched monotonically increases with foil area. While personnel monitors find utility in many areas including security, personnel control and activity detection, we believe these putative sensors to be useful in inobtrusive monitoring of elders to provide them with increased independence at a critical time in their lives.