Section: New Results

A Low-Cost approach to the Verification of Daily Activities of Elders

Activities of Daily Living (ADL) are abilities defining the functional status of an individual. Verifying what ADLs are performed by an elder is a decisive factor to determine what kinds and what levels of assistance are needed for an individual and whether aging in place is desirable. The importance of this issue has led a number of researchers to develop a range of Ubicomp approaches that can monitor activities.

In this study, we take these prior results one step further and apply them to the needs of caregiver professionals to monitor elders at their home. Specifically, our approach relies on the following key observation: as people age their daily activities are increasingly organized according to a routine to optimize their daily functioning. As a result, their activities do not need to be recognized but should rather be verified. Deviations are a warning sign of degradation.

We have developed an approach to activity verification. This approach relies on a technological infrastructure that is simple, low-cost and non-intrusive. This infrastructure was deployed in four homes of elders of 83 years of age on average. The same set of sensors was used in the four homes and was placed at strategic locations with respect to their routines to verify the target activities. The analysis of the data collected during five weekdays show that they follow very strict routines that can easily be associated with their main activities.

This work is in the context of the DomAssist project, funded by the following partners: UDCCAS, CG33, CRA, CNSA, Chambre des métiers. A report of the work has been published at the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2014) [25] .