Analysis Responses

View List of Ontology Terms

State of the Art of Audio- and Video-Based Solutions for AAL

Category: User Experience

It is a matter of fact that Europe is facing more and more crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and the current economic context. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has stressed this situation even further, thus highlighting the need for taking action. Active and Assisted Living (AAL) technologies come as a viable approach to help facing these challenges, thanks to the high potential they have in enabling remote care and support. Broadly speaking, AAL can be referred to as the use of innovative and advanced Information and Communication Technologies to create supportive, inclusive and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. AAL capitalizes on the growing pervasiveness and effectiveness of sensing and computing facilities to supply the persons in need with smart assistance, by responding to their necessities of autonomy, independence, comfort, security and safety. The application scenarios addressed by AAL are complex, due to the inherent heterogeneity of the end-user population, their living arrangements, and their physical conditions or impairment. Despite aiming at diverse goals, AAL systems should share some common characteristics. They are designed to provide support in daily life in an invisible, unobtrusive and user-friendly manner. Moreover, they are conceived to be intelligent, to be able to learn and adapt to the requirements and requests of the assisted people, and to synchronise with their specific needs. Nevertheless, to ensure the uptake of AAL in society, potential users must be willing to use AAL applications and to integrate them in their daily environments and lives. In this respect, video- and audio-based AAL applications have several advantages, in terms of unobtrusiveness and information richness. Indeed, cameras and microphones are far less obtrusive with respect to the hindrance other wearable sensors may cause to one's activities. In addition, a single camera placed in a room can record most of the activities performed in the room, thus replacing many other non-visual sensors. Currently, video-based applications are effective in recognising and monitoring the activities, the movements, and the overall conditions of the assisted individuals as well as to assess their vital parameters (e.g., heart rate, respiratory rate). Similarly, audio sensors have the potential to become one of the most important modalities for interaction with AAL systems, as ?iew full abstract

Category: User Experience

Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies are increasingly presented and sold as essential smart additions to daily life and home environments that will radically transform the healthcare and wellness markets of the future. An ethical approach and a thorough understanding of all ethics in surveillance/monitoring architectures are therefore pressing. AAL poses many ethical challenges raising questions that will affect immediate acceptance and long-term usage. Furthermore, ethical issues emerge from social inequalities and their potential exacerbation by AAL, accentuating the existing access gap between high-income countries (HIC) and low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Legal aspects mainly refer to the adherence to existing legal frameworks and cover issues related to product safety, data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and access to data by public, private, and government bodies. Successful privacy-friendly AAL applications are needed, as the pressure to bring Internet of Things (IoT) devices and ones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) quickly to market cannot overlook the fact that the environments in which AAL will operate are mostly private (e.g., the home). The social issues focus on the impact of AAL technologies before and after their adoption. Future AAL technologies need to consider all aspects of equality such as gender, race, age and social disadvantages and avoid increasing loneliness and isolation among, e.g. older and frail people. Finally, the current power asymmetries between the target and general populations should not be underestimated nor should the discrepant needs and motivations of the target group and those developing and deploying AAL systems. Whilst AAL technologies provide promising solutions for the health and social care challenges, they are not exempt from ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI). A set of ELSI guidelines is needed to integrate these factors at the research and development stage.

Category: User Experience

Strong and steady are training groups adapted for seniors who experience unsteadiness with incipient functional impairment who need balance and strength training. The new national recommendations for physical activity specify that elderly people with impaired balance, in addition to being physically active for 30 minutes at least 5 days a week, should do balance exercises and strength training to improve strength and balance and thus reduce the risk of falling. 60 municipalities in Norway are using this programme.

Category: Projects

Super Lingo is a project to create an online English-language learning tool. The program will consist of short, intensive language classes and are designed for healthy adults as well as those have reported Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and people with early stage dementia. The users of the tool will use the online games and role playing scenarios independently for a six-month period.

TACTILE

Category: User Experience

The focus of TACTILE is to develop a mixed reality (MR) software for elderly people for playing board games and doing physical training exercises on MR glasses. The MR environment will support the high usability of the overall system by combining a common board game setup (including real game pieces) with virtual game pieces. The system recognizes the real game parts on the gaming board of player A and sends this information to player B where they are represented by virtual game parts. This process is bidirectional and so the two spatially separated players can play one single game together.

Category: User Experience

Technologial Solution based on multisource data to detect loneliness in adults 55

Category: Other

It analyses trends in the generation and uptake of advanced technologies, entrepreneurial activities and skills supply and demand in the medical devices industry, and secondly, it also explores trends in the related healthcare sector from a demand-side perspective.

Category: User Experience

Journal paper: Abstract: The development of ?ge-friendly cities' has become a major area of work in the field of ageing and the built environment. This movement is driven by the observation that cities are home to an ever-increasing ageing population. Over the past decade, a multitude of age-friendly initiatives have been developed with the aim of making physical and social environments more favourable for older people's well-being, health and ability to live in the community. This article explores ten key questions associated with the age-friendly cities and communities' movement, with a particular focus on the built environment. It provides an overview of the history of the age-friendly cities' movement and the underlying models, the aspects of the built environment that are relevant for age-friendly cities, the ways age-friendliness can be evaluated, and the interactions between age-friendly cities initiatives and other strategic agendas such as smart cities. The paper concludes by discussing future perspectives and possible directions for further development of the age-friendly movement.

Category: Taxonomies

The toolkit allows to elicit a description about an Integrated Care Programme, enhanced by technology. It provides 23 Classes of -Integration Needs-, each denoting a -Service Component- (i.e. a set of homogeneous care

Category: User Experience

The overall objective of the PHArA-ON project is to provide support for Europe's ageing population by integrating digital services, devices, and tools into open platforms that can be readily deployed while maintaining the dignity of older adults and enhancing their independence, safety, and capabilities. The project will utilise a range of digital tools including connected devices (e.g., the Internet of Things, IoT), artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud and edge computing, smart wearables, big data, and intelligent analytics that will be integrated to provide personalised and optimised health care delivery.