will result in an increased freedom and self-
determined way of moving outside.
Study participants assigned to the control group
will naturally face a disadvantage to those assigned to
the intervention group. To allow all study subjects to
use FreeWalker we will offer a voluntary extension
phase starting after the core study phase during which
all study subjects are eligible to be switched over into
the intervention group regardless of their initial group
assignment. The study design has been approved by
the ethical commissions of all three test countries.
5 CONCLUSIONS
We have presented work in progress on an adaptive,
dynamic geo-fencing solution to improve the safety
of persons with dementia and frailty in the outside
environment. The "FreeWalker" system is capable of
computing personalized safe zones by monitoring the
typical daily walking behaviour of the user with a
GNSS dongle or smart phone app, to mitigate
wandering and getting lost. Temporary safe corridors
to appointment destinations are automatically
computed from the online calendar of the user.
The system computes the personalized safe zones
using a weighted map of the users walking
trajectories from GNSS data and periodically updates
the safe zone every 24 hours. Safe corridors are
generated from queries to the Google map API
composed of three alternative walking routes from the
user’s home to an appointment destination. The
corridors are activated during the time of the
appointment only and the progress of the user to the
destination is monitored and abnormal situations are
detected.
In addition, the user will be notified on a
potentially abnormal situation in a first step by the
system via the smart-phone app. Only after this step,
if the user does not respond or actively ask for help,
the carer will be alarmed in the next step. It is
expected that this concept will lead to an increased
freedom and self-determined way of moving outside
compared to existing "fixed zone" geo-fencing
systems.
After the completion of the technical development
in fall 2020, future work is to perform a clinical study
on the beneficial effects of the system on its users.
The study is planned with approximately 100
participants in Austria, Switzerland and The
Netherlands, started in December 2020 and is planned
to be completed in June 2021, to analyse the
difference in outdoor movement behaviour of persons
with and without the system.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project has received funding from the EU via the
AAL Joint Programme under contract no. AAL-2017-
057, the Austrian Research Promotion Agency
(FFG), the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate
Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation
and Technology (BMK), The Netherlands
Organisation for Health Research and Development
(ZonMw) and the Swiss Innovation Agency -
Innosuisse.
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