Technology-Enabled Senior Living: A Preliminary Report on Stakeholder Perspectives.

BACKGROUND: The integration of stakeholders is crucial in developing smart living technologies to support the autonomy of elderly populations. Despite the clear benefits of these technologies, there remains a significant gap in comprehensive research. METHODS: This study presents the viewpoints of 19 stakeholders from Europe and Japan, focusing on the sustainability of smart living solutions for Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA). Data were gathered through qualitative semi-structured interviews and analysed using a Framework Analysis approach. RESULTS: Analysis of the interviews revealed six key sustainability categories: addressing the unmet needs of older adults, functionalities of the smart living coach, integration within organizations, identified barriers, financial considerations, and the social role of the smart living coach. CONCLUSIONS: This research underscores the importance of evaluating user needs through the involvement of various stakeholders, including the elderly, their caregivers, professionals, technicians, service providers, and government bodies. Collaborative efforts are essential to generate new evidence demonstrating the value of smart living solutions in facilitating Active and Healthy Ageing.

Empowering Smart Aging: Insights into the Technical Architecture of the e-VITA Virtual Coaching System for Older Adults.

With a substantial rise in life expectancy throughout the last century, society faces the imperative of seeking inventive approaches to foster active aging and provide adequate aging care. The e-VITA initiative, jointly funded by the European Union and Japan, centers on an advanced virtual coaching methodology designed to target essential aspects of promoting active and healthy aging. This paper describes the technical framework underlying the e-VITA virtual coaching system platform and presents preliminary feedback on its use. At its core is the e-VITA Manager, a pivotal component responsible for harmonizing the seamless integration of various specialized devices and modules. These modules include the Dialogue Manager, Data Fusion, and Emotional Detection, each making distinct contributions to enhance the platform's functionalities. The platform's design incorporates a multitude of devices and software components from Europe and Japan, each built upon diverse technologies and standards. This versatile platform facilitates communication and seamless integration among smart devices such as sensors and robots while efficiently managing data to provide comprehensive coaching functionalities.

Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing.

Since life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Several use cases were then chosen for development utilising the open-source Rasa framework. The system uses common representations such as Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Graphs to enable the integration of context, subject expertise, and multimodal data, and is available in English, German, French, Italian, and Japanese.

Weighted Brain Network Analysis on Different Stages of Clinical Cognitive Decline.

This study addresses brain network analysis over different clinical severity stages of cognitive dysfunction using electroencephalography (EEG). We exploit EEG data of subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) patients, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. We propose a new framework to study the topological networks with a spatiotemporal entropy measure for estimating the connectivity. Our results show that functional connectivity and graph analysis are frequency-band dependent, and alterations start at the MCI stage. In delta, the SCI group exhibited a decrease of clustering coefficient and an increase of path length compared to MCI and AD. In alpha, the opposite behavior appeared, suggesting a rapid and high efficiency in information transmission across the SCI network. Modularity analysis showed that electrodes of the same brain region were distributed over several modules, and some obtained modules in SCI were extended from anterior to posterior regions. These results demonstrate that the SCI network was more resilient to neuronal damage compared to that of MCI and even more compared to that of AD. Finally, we confirm that MCI is a transitional stage between SCI and AD, with a predominance of high-strength intrinsic connectivity, which may reflect the compensatory response to the neuronal damage occurring early in the disease process.

A Comparative Study of Functional Connectivity Measures for Brain Network Analysis in the Context of AD Detection with EEG.

This work addresses brain network analysis considering different clinical severity stages of cognitive dysfunction, based on resting-state electroencephalography (EEG). We use a cohort acquired in real-life clinical conditions, which contains EEG data of subjective cognitive impairment (SCI) patients, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. We propose to exploit an epoch-based entropy measure to quantify the connectivity links in the networks. This entropy measure relies on a refined statistical modeling of EEG signals with Hidden Markov Models, which allow a better estimation of the spatiotemporal characteristics of EEG signals. We also propose to conduct a comparative study by considering three other measures largely used in the literature: phase lag index, coherence, and mutual information. We calculated such measures at different frequency bands and computed different local graph parameters considering different proportional threshold values for a binary network analysis. After applying a feature selection procedure to determine the most relevant features for classification performance with a linear Support Vector Machine algorithm, our study demonstrates the effectiveness of the statistical entropy measure for analyzing the brain network in patients with different stages of cognitive dysfunction.

Smart Sound Sensor to Detect the Number of People in a Room.

Ambient sound monitoring is a widely used strategy to follow older adults, which could help them achieve healthy ageing with comfort and security. In a previous work, we have already developed a smart audio sensor able to recognize everyday life sounds in order to detect activities of daily living (ADL) and distress situations. In this paper, we propose to add a new functionality by analyzing the speech flow to detect the number of people in a room. The proposed algorithms are based on speaker diarization methods. This information can be used to better detect activities of daily life but also to know when the person is home alone. This functionality can also offer more comfort through light, heating and air conditioning adaptation to the number of people in an environment.

Remote monitoring, distress detection by slightest invasive systems: Sound recognition based on hierarchical i-vectors.

Europe has a growing aging population, leading to the need for adapted healthcare services. Our work aims at proposing a solution for falls detection of elderly people using sound recognition based on a hierarchical i-vectors system. The system presented in this paper improves significantly the accuracy of sound recognition compared to the state of the art methods. The latter provides a good recognition rate of 81.98% on noiseless sounds. This system needs to be tested in a noisy environment and this can be improved by using new sound descriptors.

Design and first evaluation of a sleep characterization monitoring system using remote contactless sensor.

This paper presents the design and a first evaluation of a new monitoring system based on contactless sensors to estimate sleep quality. This sensor produces thermal signals which have been used, at first, to detect a human presence in the bed and then to estimate sleep quality. To distinguish between different sleep phases, we have used methods of signal processing in order to extract the necessary features for learning an adapted statistical model. The existing monitoring systems use sensors attached to the bed or worn by the person. We propose in this paper a system based on a passive thermal sensor which has the advantage of being fixed on the wall, thus it is easier to use and more reliable. We explain different signal processing steps and describe sleep stage recognition algorithms. We propose an adaptation of the SAX method for the thermal signal. Finally, we evaluate our system in comparison with a polysomnographic recording system in the Hospital (CHU) of Limoges.

A dynamic evidential network for fall detection.

This study is part of the development of a remote home healthcare monitoring application designed to detect distress situations through several types of sensors. The multisensor fusion can provide more accurate and reliable information compared to information provided by each sensor separately. Furthermore, data from multiple heterogeneous sensors present in the remote home healthcare monitoring systems have different degrees of imperfection and trust. Among the multisensor fusion methods, Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) is currently considered the most appropriate for representing and processing the imperfect information. Based on a graphical representation of the DST called evidential networks, a structure of heterogeneous data fusion from multiple sensors for fall detection has been proposed. The evidential networks, implemented on our remote medical monitoring platform, are also proposed in this paper to maximize the performance of automatic fall detection and thus make the system more reliable. However, the presence of noise, the variability of recorded signals by the sensors, and the failing or unreliable sensors may thwart the evidential networks performance. In addition, the sensors signals nonstationary nature may degrade the experimental conditions. To compensate the nonstationary effect, the time evolution is considered by introducing the dynamic evidential network which was evaluated by the simulated fall scenarios corresponding to various use cases.

Sound event detection in remote health care - small learning datasets and over constrained Gaussian Mixture Models.

The use of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), adapted through the Expectation Minimization (EM) algorithm, is not rare in Audio Analysis for Surveillance Applications and Environmental sound recognition. Their use is founded on the good qualities of GMM models when aimed at approximating Probability Density Functions (PDF) of random variables. But in some cases, where models are to be adapted from small sample sets instead of large but generic databases, a problem of balance between model complexity and sample size may play an important role. From this perspective, we show, through simple sound classification experiments, that constrained GMM, with fewer degrees of freedom, as compared to GMM with full covariance matrices, provide better classification performances. Moreover, pushing this argument even further, we also show that a Parzen model can do even better than usual GMM.

Multimodal localization in the context of a medical telemonitoring system.

This paper addresses a localization system which is based on a combination of information from two modalities: a Smart Home Person Tracking (SHPT) composed of infrared sensors and an Audio Person Tracking (APT) which uses microphones able to estimate azimuth of acoustic sources. This combination improves precision of localization compared to a standalone or separated module. The localization software facilitates the integration of both SHPT and APT systems, to display the position in real time, to record data and detect some distress situations (some kind of fall). Results on implementation show good adaptation for Smart Home environments and a robust detection.

Incremental HMM training applied to ECG signal analysis.

This work discusses the implementation of incremental hidden Markov model (HMM) training methods for electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. The HMMs are used to model the ECG signal as a sequence of connected elementary waveforms. Moreover, an adaptation process is implemented to adapt the HMMs to the ECG signal of a particular individual. The adaptation training strategy is based on incremental versions of the expectation-maximization, segmental k-means and Bayesian approaches. Performance of the training methods was assessed through experiments considering the QT and ST-T databases. The results obtained show that the incremental training improves beat segmentation and ischemia detection performance with the advantage of low computational effort.

ECG signal analysis through hidden Markov models.

This paper presents an original hidden Markov model (HMM) approach for online beat segmentation and classification of electrocardiograms. The HMM framework has been visited because of its ability of beat detection, segmentation and classification, highly suitable to the electrocardiogram (ECG) problem. Our approach addresses a large panel of topics some of them never studied before in other HMM related works: waveforms modeling, multichannel beat segmentation and classification, and unsupervised adaptation to the patient's ECG. The performance was evaluated on the two-channel QT database in terms of waveform segmentation precision, beat detection and classification. Our waveform segmentation results compare favorably to other systems in the literature. We also obtained high beat detection performance with sensitivity of 99.79% and a positive predictivity of 99.96%, using a test set of 59 recordings. Moreover, premature ventricular contraction beats were detected using an original classification strategy. The results obtained validate our approach for real world application.