Assistive Technologies for the Ageing Society

In a recent survey of intelligent technologies for an ageing population (Pollack 2005) the major goals of technologies or systems designed to support older adults, which can be summarised as follows :

• Provide assurance that they are safe and are performing necessary daily activities,
• help them compensate for their impairments and assist in the performance of daily activities;
• and assess the elder’s cognitive status.

  Systems

  Assurance systems aim primarily at ensuring safety and wellbeing and at reducing caregiver burden, by tracking an elder’s behaviour and providing up-to-date status reports.

  Compensation systems provide guidance to people as they carry out their daily activities, reminding them of what they need to do and how to do it.

  Assessment systems attempt to infer how well a person is doing, what his cognitive level of functioning is, based on continual observation of his or her performance of routine activities.

  Advances beyond the state-of-the art

  Whereas assurance systems are already available as commercial products, compensation systems that actually intervene and assist someone in accomplishing his or her daily activities mainly exist as research prototypes. Currently, most cognitive assessment is done in a clinical setting.
  According to the authors, the research challenges can be found primarily in the development of assessment systems that provide continual, naturalistic assessment of the cognitive and affective status of older adults. And this is exactly what ALADIN proposes to achieve.

  Online monitoring

  ALADIN will use sensor-based monitoring, combined with adaptive algorithms, to assess people’s level of functioning in a continuous way and a real-life setting as they go about their routine activities. Because of the great diversity of situations, events or individuals, the direction of change or adaptation is unlikely to be known beforehand.

  This is why the impact of the contextual variables on particular individuals will be constantly monitored within a feedback cycle and only those which have the desired effect are chosen whereas the others get discarded.

  The Challenge

  The above-mentioned article by Pollack (2005) also emphasises the need for interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers having expertise in sensor-network architectures, privacy and security and human-machine interaction.

  Our team combines expertise from all these fields and is therefore well equipped to face these challenges. It will be the joining of forces and the pooling of resources of all the partners with their different types of experience and expertise that will enable us to achieve our objectives.