AmIE: An Ambient Intelligent Environment for Assisted Living

TL;DR

This paper introduces AmIE, an IoT-based ambient intelligence system designed to assist visually impaired and elderly individuals indoors through voice-controlled navigation, environmental information, and emergency support, using cost-effective hardware.

Contribution

It presents a novel, multilingual, voice-controlled IoT environment tailored for assisted living, integrating indoor positioning and emergency features with affordable hardware solutions.

Findings

System effectively aids navigation and information access for users.

Multilingual voice control enhances usability in diverse populations.

Cost-effective implementation demonstrates practical deployment feasibility.

Abstract

In the modern world of technology Internet-of-things (IoT) systems strives to provide an extensive interconnected and automated solutions for almost every life aspect. This paper proposes an IoT context-aware system to present an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environment; such as an apartment, house, or a building; to assist blind, visually-impaired, and elderly people. The proposed system aims at providing an easy-to-utilize voice-controlled system to locate, navigate and assist users indoors. The main purpose of the system is to provide indoor positioning, assisted navigation, outside weather information, room temperature, people availability, phone calls and emergency evacuation when needed. The system enhances the user's awareness of the surrounding environment by feeding them with relevant information through a wearable device to assist them. In addition, the system is voice-controlled in both English and Arabic languages and the information are displayed as audio messages in both languages. The system design, implementation, and evaluation consider the constraints in common types of premises in Kuwait and in challenges, such as the training needed by the users. This paper presents cost-effective implementation options by the adoption of a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, Bluetooth Low Energy devices and an Android smart watch.