Section: Application Domains

Ambient Services for Assisted Living

Participants : Remi Barraquand, Frédéric Devernay, Amaury Negre, James Crowley.

The continued progress in extending life-span, coupled with declining birth rates have resulted in a growing number of elderly people with varying disabilities who are unable to conduct a normal life at home, thereby becoming more and more isolated from society. Governmental agencies including hospitals, healthcare institutions and social care institutions are increasingly overburdened with care of this growing population. Left unchecked, economic and man-power requirements for care of the elderly could well trigger a societal and economic crisis. There is an urgent societal need for technologies and services that allow elderly people to live autonomously in their own environments for longer periods. Smart environments provide a promising new enabling technology for such services.

Adapting smart environments to enhance the autonomy and quality of life for elderly require:

• Robust, plug-and-play sensor technologies monitor the activities and health of elderly in their own home environments.

• Easy to use communications services that allow people to maintain a sense of presence to avoid isolation without disrupting privacy or distracting attention from normal daily activities.

• Architectural frameworks that allow ad hoc composition of services from distributed heterogeneous components scattered throughout the environment.

• Distributed system architectures which allow the cooperation of independent emergency services to work together to provide emergency care,

• Technologies interpret activity to warn of loss of mobility or cognitive function.

• Engineering approaches for the customization/personalization/adaptation of living assistance systems at installation and run time,

• Social, privacy, ethical and legal safeguards for privacy and control of personal data.