Reasoning Support for Risk Prediction and Prevention in Independent Living

TL;DR

This paper presents SINDI, a sensor-based system using logic programming to support elderly care by inferring health status and predicting health evolutions with minimal invasive data collection.

Contribution

The novel hierarchical logic-based model integrates diverse data sources and employs Answer Set Programming for reasoning about health in elderly care.

Findings

Effective reasoning with incomplete data

Supports prediction of health changes

Simplifies knowledge encoding for caregivers

Abstract

In recent years there has been growing interest in solutions for the delivery of clinical care for the elderly, due to the large increase in aging population. Monitoring a patient in his home environment is necessary to ensure continuity of care in home settings, but, to be useful, this activity must not be too invasive for patients and a burden for caregivers. We prototyped a system called SINDI (Secure and INDependent lIving), focused on i) collecting a limited amount of data about the person and the environment through Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), and ii) inferring from these data enough information to support caregivers in understanding patients' well being and in predicting possible evolutions of their health. Our hierarchical logic-based model of health combines data from different sources, sensor data, tests results, common-sense knowledge and patient's clinical profile at the lower level, and correlation rules between health conditions across upper levels. The logical formalization and the reasoning process are based on Answer Set Programming. The expressive power of this logic programming paradigm makes it possible to reason about health evolution even when the available information is incomplete and potentially incoherent, while declarativity simplifies rules specification by caregivers and allows automatic encoding of knowledge. This paper describes how these issues have been targeted in the application scenario of the SINDI system.