Towards a new paradigm for assistive technology at home: research challenges, design issues and performance assessment

TL;DR

This paper discusses a new paradigm for assistive home technology focusing on understanding and motivating elderly or disabled individuals to perform daily activities, using sensor-based systems and conversational interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces Arianna, a system with a computational inference engine that monitors activities and motivates users through speech, integrating nearables and wearable sensors.

Findings

Effective activity recognition demonstrated

Enhanced user motivation through dialogue

Potential for improved quality of life

Abstract

Providing elderly and people with special needs, including those suffering from physical disabilities and chronic diseases, with the possibility of retaining their independence at best is one of the most important challenges our society is expected to face. Assistance models based on the home care paradigm are being adopted rapidly in almost all industrialized and emerging countries. Such paradigms hypothesize that it is necessary to ensure that the so-called Activities of Daily Living are correctly and regularly performed by the assisted person to increase the perception of an improved quality of life. This chapter describes the computational inference engine at the core of Arianna, a system able to understand whether an assisted person performs a given set of ADL and to motivate him/her in performing them through a speech-mediated motivational dialogue, using a set of nearables to be installed in an apartment, plus a wearable to be worn or fit in garments.