Topics

To achieve this objective, several topics need to be tackled. These topics can be summarized within two points: finer activity description and longitudinal experimentation. Finer activity description is needed for instance, to discriminate the activities (e.g. sitting, walking, eating) of Alzheimer patients from the ones of healthy older people. It is essential to be able to pre-diagnose dementia and to provide a better and more specialised care. Longer analysis is required when people monitoring aims at measuring the evolution of patient behavioral disorders. Setting up such long experimentation with dementia people has never been tried before but is necessary to have real-world validation. This is one of the challenge of the European FP7 project Dem@Care where several patient homes should be monitored over several months.

For this domain, a goal for Stars is to allow people with dementia to continue living in a self-sufficient manner in their own homes or residential centers, away from a hospital, as well as to allow clinicians and caregivers remotely proffer effective care and management. For all this to become possible, comprehensive monitoring of the daily life of the person with dementia is deemed necessary, since caregivers and clinicians will need a comprehensive view of the person's daily activities, behavioural patterns, lifestyle, as well as changes in them, indicating the progression of their condition.

Ethical and Acceptability Issues

The development and ultimate use of novel assistive technologies by a vulnerable user group such as individuals with dementia, and the assessment methodologies planned by Stars are not free of ethical, or even legal concerns, even if many studies have shown how these Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be useful and well accepted by older people with or without impairments. Thus one goal of Stars team is to design the right technologies that can provide the appropriate information to the medical carers while preserving people privacy. Moreover, Stars will pay particular attention to ethical, acceptability, legal and privacy concerns that may arise, addressing them in a professional way following the corresponding established EU and national laws and regulations, especially when outside France. Now, Stars can benefit from the support of the COERLE (Comité Opérationnel d'Evaluation des Risques Légaux et Ethiques) to help it to respect ethical policies in its applications.