HomeAssist: Platform for Assisted Living

The objective of this project is to provide an open platform of digital assistance dedicated to aging in place. This project is in collaboration with researchers in Cognitive Science (Bordeaux University) and the UDCCAS Gironde (Union Départementale des Centres Communaux d’Action Sociale) managing elderly care. This project includes a need analysis, the development of assistive applications and their experimental validation.

This work is funded by CARSAT Aquitaine (“Caisse d'Assurance Retraite et de la Santé au Travail”), Aquitaine Region and Conseil Général de la Gironde.

Cognitive Assistance for Supporting the Autonomy of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

The objective of this project is to develop assistive technologies enabling people with intellectual disabilities to gain independence and to develop self-determined behaviors, such as making choices and taking decisions. This project is in collaboration with the “Handicap et Système Nerveux” research group (EA 4136, Bordeaux University), the TSA Chair of UQTR (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières) in Psychology and the Association Trisomie 21 Gironde (Down Syndrome). The TSA chair has recently designed and built a smart apartment that is used to conduct experimental evaluation of our assistive technologies in realistic conditions.

Certification of an open platform

The purpose of this project is to define concepts and tools for developing certifying open platforms. This certification process must ensure a set of critical properties (e.g., safety, confidentiality, security) by certifying each tier application. These guarantees are essential to ensure that openness does not come at the expense of the user's well-being. To preserve the innovation model of open platforms, this certification process should also be as automatic as possible. Indeed, the success of open platforms is mainly due to the low development cost of a new application. The case study of this thesis will be the domain of home automation. The results of this thesis will be put into practice in the DiaSuiteBox open platform.

This project is funded by Aquitaine Region.

ANDDI

Five percent of the population have Intellectual Disabilities (ID). Individuals with ID have significant socio-adaptive limitations in a variety of daily activities, at home (task planification and execution, medication, home safety, etc.) as well as outside (route planning, itinerary in public transportation, etc.). Individuals with ID, their families, health institutions, caregiving services, and dedicated organizations strive to find ways in which these individuals can live as independently as possible, while promoting their social inclusion in every respect of their life (housing, professional training, employment, leisure, culture, etc.).

The research project ANDDI leverages the abilities of individuals with ID and the recent technological advances to develop a variety of assistive services addressing their daily needs. These services draw on our expertise in cognitive science and computer science, dedicated to assisting users with technologies. In particular, we use our platform, named HomeAssist, dedicated to the independently living of older adults. This platform relies on DiaSuite, our suite of tools for developing applications that orchestrate networked objects, and DiaSuiteBox, our platform that runs an open-ended set of applications, sensors, actuators and web services.

ANDDI addresses users with Down syndrome aiming to live independently; it pursues the following goals: