Section: Application Domains

Healthcare Monitoring

Since 2011, we have initiated a strategic partnership (called CobTek) with Nice hospital  [62], [75] (CHU Nice, Prof P. Robert) to start ambitious research activities dedicated to healthcare monitoring and to assistive technologies. These new studies address the analysis of more complex spatio-temporal activities (e.g. complex interactions, long term activities).

Research

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 specialized 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 provide 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, behavioral 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.

As presented in 3.1, Stars aims at designing cognitive vision systems with perceptual capabilities to monitor efficiently people activities. As a matter of fact, vision sensors can be seen as intrusive ones, even if no images are acquired or transmitted (only meta-data describing activities need to be collected). Therefore new communication paradigms and other sensors (e.g. accelerometers, RFID, and new sensors to come in the future) are also envisaged to provide the most appropriate services to the observed people, while preserving their privacy. To better understand ethical issues, Stars members are already involved in several ethical organizations. For instance, F. Brémond has been a member of the ODEGAM - “Commission Ethique et Droit” (a local association in Nice area for ethical issues related to older people) from 2010 to 2011 and a member of the French scientific council for the national seminar on “La maladie d'Alzheimer et les nouvelles technologies - Enjeux éthiques et questions de société” in 2011. This council has in particular proposed a chart and guidelines for conducting researches with dementia patients.

For addressing the acceptability issues, focus groups and HMI (Human Machine Interaction) experts, will be consulted on the most adequate range of mechanisms to interact and display information to older people.