Ambient Assisted Living Buddy
Alexiei Dingli
and Michael Buhagiar
Department of Intelligent Computer Systems, Faculty of ICT, University of Malta, Msida, Malta
Keywords: Ambient Assisted Living, Virtual Companion, Software Agent.
Abstract: The research area of ambient assisted living is concerned with providing required assistance to elderly
and/or disabled people in order for them to get through their everyday tasks and chores in an easy and safe
manner. This usually makes use of hardware and/or software solutions in relation to the virtual / senior
companion field of study. Additionally, ambient assisted living exerts a number of tools and resources
specifically developed as technological aids for an ageing population. This project looks at the possibility of
improving someone’s quality of life through the use of an ambient assisted living prototype solution. By
combining vital research aspects from the fields of: ambient assisted living, technological aids for the aging
population, and senior / virtual companions, this project explore the development and evaluation of such a
software solution, the Ambient Assisted Living Buddy (AALB). This implies that the AALB manages to
work correctly as a concept to ambient assisted living. Furthermore, this project proved that the possibility
of improving someone’s quality of life through an ambient assisted living solution can be effective and has a
high potential.
1 INTRODUCTION
As the human body advances in age it is commonly
observed that the body gets weaker and more fragile
making it more accident prone and having everyday
life tasks gradually harder to complete. Bearing this
in mind, the sole driving force of this project was to
create something that delivers an environment for a
better and longer lasting life. This environment is to
be provided via the fully operational Ambient
Assisted Living Buddy (AALB), which seeks to
research whether an interactive monitoring system
raises hope in delivering an improvement upon the
current style of life.
1.1 Scientific Question
The principal aim of this dissertation was to be able
to come up with a sensible and well supported
answer to the scientific question,
Can an assisted living system (the AALB) improve
someone’s quality of life?
Through this, the concept and implementation of the
AALB started to take shape, with the notion of
managing to supply a sensible scientific solution.
1.2 Aims and Objectives
The primary objective of the AALB project is to
provide the construction for an interactive system
aimed at aiding the elderly and disabled to cope
better with their situation.
The AALB will be installed and integrated with a
user’s personal mobile phone thus allowing the ease
and extended ability of real-time monitoring and
user prompted actions. The most vital aspect of all
of this project is that it is kept simple to use, thus
implying that an old person with no real idea of the
present technological advancements can utilise it
just as well as a geek and an expert. The three main
goals are:
1. The aim was to review the current situation of
the elderly with respect to technological aids.
2. The design and implementations of an AAL,
complemented with a series of vital design
decisions. This was highlighted through the
methodology.
3. An assessment of the output results of this
research was carried out through system
evaluation, while the potential for further
developments was realised under Conclusion &
Future Work.
53
Dingli A. and Buhagiar M..
Ambient Assisted Living Buddy.
DOI: 10.5220/0005439800530058
In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health (ICT4AgeingWell-
2015), pages 53-58
ISBN: 978-989-758-102-1
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
2 RELATED WORK
Ambient assisted living is the concept and idea of
utilising various number of ICT and/or technology
related aspects in order to better the quality of life of
certain specific particular people. This primarily
focuses on aiding the elderly and/or disabled people
in managing to deal with fulfilling their everyday
needs through activities, chores, and entertainment.
Thus, in turn, such technologies and computer
related breakthroughs ease the life and job of said
conventional personnel whilst managing to maintain
a more pleasant experience for the effected elderly
and disabled alike. Finally, this area proves to make
the users lead a more independent life where less
support from the usual caretakers and family
relatives is required. The solutions to this area of
research are designed and implemented with key
aspects such as, a user-interactive feature, and its
integration with the everyday routine. Both of these
are very powerful and take into consideration that in
most cases the user suffers from impairments such
as hearing difficulties and lack of eye sight. By
managing to accomplish all of this, the resulting
solution helps in ensuring the simple yet vital
characteristic of doing so much with so little effort.
2.1 Assistive Technologies
The formal strict definition of an Assistive
Technology (AT) device is given as,
“...an umbrella term for any device or system
that allows an individual to perform a task they
would otherwise be unable to do or increases the
ease and safety with which the task can be
performed.” (Cowan and Turner-Smith, 1999);
(Beech and Roberts, 2008)
This definition is seen to describe what an AT
actually is and not really what it promises to achieve
in its methodologies and deliverables. Perhaps a
more goal oriented definition which focuses on the
AT’s ability to ensure the peek amount of
independence for the elderly, is shown hereunder,
“AT is any product or service designed to enable
independence for disabled and older people.”
(King’s Fund, 2001); (Beech and Roberts, 2008)
Moreover, the term AT goes over a distinct number
of devices that vary from, simple assistances to
move about, to complicated computer oriented
medical devices. Current persisting advances and
breakthroughs in technology bring, to the ATs, a
new amount of promising possibilities that it is now
their best chance of working in achieving and
realising their goal. These ATs, through the
utilisation of aiding assistance and notification
facilities, now have the better chance of allowing the
elderly people to live a longer self-sufficient life
from their own personal home. (Brignell et al., 2007)
(Blaschke et al., 2009) (Williams et al., 2013)
Having said this, the currently available and soon
to be released ATs fall under one of the following
arrangements, according to their specific prominent
task: (Doughty, 2004); (Beech and Roberts, 2008)
Technologies which offer a sense of assistance to
individuals aiding them in any chores.
Receptive technologies that aid the individual to
handle hazards and raise an alert.
Preventative technologies that keep the user
away from hazards, while triggering an alert.
2.2 Technological Aids for the Aging
Population
The main idea of this research area revolves around
any kind of technology-oriented aid that is observed
to have the possibility of leaving an impact on the
quality of life and the life expectancy. It is important
to note that the approach is concerned with the
possibility of an improvement and not actual
certainty; thus the potential enhancements and aids
looked at do not have a definite guarantee of
appearing in the imminent future.
In the light of this project, these technological
aids incorporate new means of providing assistance
and support to elderly and disabled people, which
have been made possible through recent
technological development and breakthroughs. This
assistance and support comes as a methodology of
reducing or completely eliminating the current most
frequent accident types and dangerous situations. In
doing so, it must first be established whether such
accidents and scenarios could be reduced or
eliminated, and how any positive accomplishment
will effect life quality and expectancy.
2.3 Virtual Companions and Software
Agents
Virtual companions and software agents take a lot of
distinct forms, hence properly defining them comes
out as a general statement which collectively
includes every possible form. This general statement
defines an agent to simply be a software component
with some special features, and a virtual companion
to be nothing more than various collaborative agents
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working together. This is regarded as being the
prevailing common structure for a virtual
companion, having the diverse software agents
collaborating together and making up for all of the
available system functionalities and capabilities.
(Spyros et al., 2009)
Understanding an entire virtual companion
comes down to proper explanation of the underlying
software agents, which are sub-dived according to
their specific task completion abilities. (Spyros et
al., 2009)
2.4 The Elderly Population Today
As times progress and advances are made in the
development of medical and technological aids,
elderly people are somewhat assured that they are
able to live a longer life. This quickly results in an
increase in the percentage of old persons which
make up the entire population. As a matter of fact,
European countries have undergone a swing in their
population composition, with this percentage
increment taking its full effect (Parker and
Thorslund, August 1991). A logical fact is that,
growing older results in an increase in chronic health
difficulties. These chronically ill patients add up to
three quarters (75%) of all the healthcare’s expenses
and revenues. (Spyros et al., 2009).
Having established this scenario and situation, a
conclusion is now drawn that something must be
done so as to improve the quality of life of an elderly
person and to make him/her feel more secure and
content. In fact, first hand feedback from the elderly
people who already make use of some kind of AT
solutions reported some clear had facts. These
essentially include (i) an improvement in the ability
of taking a decision; (ii) a stronger sense of security;
(iii) more prominent freedom; (iv) an impression of
oversight and governess; (v) enhanced conditions of
life; (vi) preservation of the competence in staying at
home; (vii) less of a handful to the people taking
care of them; (viii) a boost in the aid specifically
towards persons suffering from abiding health
complications; (ix) diminishing in the number of
mishaps, mostly falls, which occur at home. (Beech
and Roberts, 2008)
2.5 Similar Systems
Fall Detection / Sensor Aiding. This branch covers
systems which are observed to make use of some
sort of sensors, with a fundamental focus in either
detecting a fall or tracking a location. These such
similar and relevant systems are namely, Fitbit
(Fitbit Inc., 2014), iFall (Sposaro and Tyson, 2009),
Detecting Human Falls with a 3 axis Digital
Accelerometer (Jia, 2009), and Sensor Aiding of
HSGPS Pedestrian Navigation (Mezentsev, 2005)
Home Care Companions. This division goes over
systems which were built as virtual companions, but
have their main driving force focused on providing
special home care support. These are, HEARTS
(Spyros et al., 2009), Virtual Carer (Sernani et al.,
2013), and HOMIE (Kriglstein and Wallner, 2005).
Dialogue / Conversational. This section explores
solutions which have the capabilities of managing a
dialogue scenario, as well as, closely mimicking
human comparable conversations. With relation to
the AALB, such a system is the Senior Companion
(Pinto et al., 2008).
Other / Miscellaneous. The final category in
comprised of only one system, namely ‘Google
Now’ (Google, 2012) which has a distinctive nature
of both functionality and deliverable aims.
3 METHODOLOGY
When it came to developing a system project, it was
first very important to properly establish the reason
for which the system would be developed. In doing
so, a problematic scenario is initially identified and
then system planning and construction could take
shape around this scenario and thrive to deliver a
proper solution. Following from this, the primary
AALB’s driving force was born and a clear picture
of how the prototype would deal with the problem
was set up.
Figure 1: System Diagram.
AmbientAssistedLivingBuddy
55
Vitally, strong attention is given to the User
Interface (UI), monitoring sensors and actuators, and
environmental re-actions in order to deliver a simple
to use yet fully functional system.
The AALB is a mobile application available on
the android operating system, which is based upon
the following three core aspects:
1. Presenting information at the right place and at
the right time
2. Offering a clear, understandable and easy to use
interface for certain everyday tasks
3. Collecting information directly and indirectly
from the user, producing the best possible
scenario output.
More specifically, the system utilises an array of
sensors along with the simple voice and touch
commands, in order to harvest the necessary input
data from the user. This captured data is then
processed in accordance to the particular scenario
and situation, and a corresponding user desired
output is produced. Figure 1 below depicts all this as
the system’s internal structure and workings.
With regards to the actual system and interface,
this will take a similar approach to what was
observed in the Google Now system, but with more
focus on elderly and disabled people rather than
everyday users and technology geeks.
A number of sensory inputs will be utilized to
gather additional information to aid a better
understanding of the appropriate and relevant output.
The sensors that are expected to be present are:
Gravity Sensor: Measures the gravitational
forces.
Linear Acceleration: Measures the forces of
acceleration, excluding the gravitational forces.
Location Sensor: Tracks the location through
GPS.
In terms of functionality and the actual information,
this will vary according to the scenario changes
indicated by the numerous sensors.
The living buddy promises to provide the
functionality of, (i) Understanding the user voice
input; (ii) User programmable notifications and
alarms; (iii) Watching over the user and potentially
informing some external entity in the case of an
arising danger; (iv) Brighten or dim the light just by
speaking to the device; and (v) Display a weather
and news report with a click or voice command
The system’s design is considered to be in the
best way in terms of both, code understand-ability,
and system overall performance. This includes, (i)
Threads that enabled simultaneous task running
without hindering system performance; (ii) Stage
variables which allowed different system checks at
different situations; and (iii) Error reporting and
alarm handling including alarm calling routines with
respect to the state variable.
The idea of this design is that every function is
able to perform on its own and only “bothers” the
system UI in the case of an error, or upon a request
for user input data.
4 RESULTS AND EVALUATION
Apart from the usual testing procedures, a public
evaluation was conducted. The respondents for the
public feedback analysis attended a social meeting
known as GRUFAN made up of nurses, elderly and
their relatives.
All of this gave me a total of around 26 people,
with age groups varying from 10-25 to 65+, a
diverse number of capabilities and a wide variety of
distinct living scenarios. For the scope of testing out
the AALB, the gender was considered as irrelevant
and thus was not even recorded.
The user stories are a couple of thought out
scenarios that the AALB is expected to be used in.
This inspects the specific situation the AALB will
mostly be useful at, whilst also identifying any
lacking features with respect to the situation.
Primarily, the system is aimed to be used on a
mobile device and thus different mobile
environments are compared to highlight some of the
limitations with respect to this criteria. Secondly,
exploration is done with regards to a person’s need
for support or living habitat. There are a total of nine
(9) user stories, divided up into two categories,
mobile oriented (first 3), and living environment and
support (the rest); as seen hereunder:
1. Prohibited mobile device use
2. Use of mobile device without carrying it around
3. Use of a mobile device and carrying it around
4. Living alone at home
5. Living with relatives but can manage alone
6. Living with relatives and requiring their
assistance
7. Living at home with someone’s assistance
8. Not living at home but can manage alone
9. Not living at home and requiring assistance
For each of the user story scenarios, the AALB was
evaluated and findings were made with respect to
the most effected functions.
Scenario 1: The AALB faired very well in this
scenario with all of the vital features functioning.
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In fact, more than 80% of the respondents rated
the effected functions a 4 or a 5 (out of 5).
Scenario 2: The major concern of this scenario
was the notifications functionality. Positively,
over 90% of the results rated this feature to be
near perfect with a score of either a 4 or a 5 (out
of 5).
Scenario 3: This utilises all of the functions of
the AALB, and thus its evaluation comes down
to the analysis of entire system. Overall the
system generated a successful feedback and so
this scenario has been entirely fulfilled.
Scenarios 4 - 9: These scenarios utilise the same
features, thus requiring AALB testing in its full
potential. This performed very well, around 90%
of the respondents gave a high rating in the
overall evaluation and above 80% gave a high
rating in the in depth functionality evaluation.
An overall evaluation questionnaire was used in
order to gather basic user information detail, along
with the overall system experience. This was divided
into three parts, (i) Personal Information; (ii) Daily
Activities and Scenario Capabilities and (iii) General
Overall System Usability.
With respect to the overall performance of the
AALB, the system was greeted very well and
positively managed to reach what it was set out to
do. Additionally, 95% of the respondents felt an
added sense of safety through fall detection and
location tacking. On a positive conclusion, just short
of 95% of the respondents indicated interest in
future similar systems, and the concept of AAL. An
in depth functionality questionnaire was used to
focus more on sole performance of four system
features, (i) Fall Detection; (ii) Location Tracking;
(iii) Notification Alerts and (iv) Voice Command
Recognition.
Analysing the respondents’ feedback, it was
observed that the system functionalities performed
very well. The great majority of the users gave a
score of 4 and above. Moreover, the greater portion
of the users agreed that the system features did not
seem to lack anything in particular, while others
pointed out that the AALB could use something
more. With respect to the fall detection, suggestions
were mostly related to notifying/ calling a pre-set
relative number. Some of these suggestions also
mentioned incorporating the GPS location with an
SMS alert in order to improve the response time of
the alerted parties.
The location tracking feature did not favour one
or two specific improvements. In fact, this generated
the distinct enhancements of, (i) Tracking past
locations; (ii) Audio alarms / notifications; (iii)
Stating the units for the input parameters; and (iv)
Accuracy. The notifications functionality followed a
similar approach with four distinct areas which the
users pointed out as requiring further working on.
Namely these are: (i) Repetitions; (ii) Location
orientation; (iii) Voice message / Read back; and
(iv) Important updates / relevant information.
It is also worth mentioning that both the location
tracking and the notifications functionalities found
users that reported that the specific feature worked
fine and did not require any kind of change and/or
improvement.
In the end, attention was directed at the future of
the system and what this might hold for it, with
respect to any additional features that the users feel
such an AAL system should have. A prominent 80%
of the participants pointed out that some additional
features such as voice commands, notifications, etc
would make the system better.
Once again, apart from all this, it is worth
mentioning that a couple of the respondents simply
reported that the system does not require any
additional features.
5 CONCLUSION
This project involved research which mainly
revolved around the areas of ambient assisted living
and senior companions. Both of these areas were
discovered to be very vast and wide spread, thus the
most relevant of the two was put together to get the
basic idea for the development of the project’s
prototype. In fact, the area of AAL provided for the
concept of the project in terms of its required
functionality, whilst the area of senior companions
provided for the feel of the system and its interaction
with the target audience.
The AALB brought with it a number of valuable
achievements as well as beneficial and helpful
lessons. Both of these are regarded to be among the
most crucial aspects of the entire project. The
valuable achievements accomplished through this
project can be derived from the results obtained
through the evaluation of the AALB against user
feedback. In fact, (i) more than 80% of the
respondents were pleased with the system
performance, resulting in an overall average of 4.5
out of 5; (ii) just under 95% of the users indicated an
added sense of safety through the fall detection and
location tracking abilities; and (iii) almost 95% of
the users showed a tendency to use a similar system
in the future. All of these positive results proved to
AmbientAssistedLivingBuddy
57
be vital with respect to the scientific question as they
all managed to show the great potential of AAL. In
fact, the AALB was found to be a valid candidate to
suit the needs of a future AAL system.
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