RESUMEN
There is a global challenge related to the increasing number of People with Dementia (PwD) and the diminishing capacity of governments, health systems, and caregivers to provide the best care for them. Cost-effective technology solutions that enable and ensure a good quality of life for PwD via monitoring and interventions have been investigated comprehensively in the literature. The objective of this study was to investigate the challenges with the design and deployment of a Smart Home In a Box (SHIB) approach to monitoring PwD wellbeing within a care home. This could then support future SHIB implementations to have an adequate and prompt deployment allowing research to focus on the data collection and analysis aspects. An important consideration was that most care homes do not have the appropriate infrastructure for installing and using ambient sensors. The SHIB was evaluated via installation in the rooms of PwD with varying degrees of dementia at Kirk House Care Home in Belfast. Sensors from the SHIB were installed to test their capabilities for detecting Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). The sensors used were: (i) thermal sensors, (ii) contact sensors, (iii) Passive Infrared (PIR) sensors, and (iv) audio level sensors. Data from the sensors were collected, stored, and handled using a 'SensorCentral' data platform. The results of this study highlight challenges and opportunities that should be considered when designing and implementing a SHIB approach in a dementia care home. Lessons learned from this investigation are presented in addition to recommendations that could support monitoring the wellbeing of PwD. The main findings of this study are: (i) most care home buildings were not originally designed to appropriately install ambient sensors, and (ii) installation of SHIB sensors should be adapted depending on the specific case of the care home where they will be installed. It was acknowledged that in addition to care homes, the homes of PwD were also not designed for an appropriate integration with ambient sensors. This study provided the community with useful lessons, that will continue to be applied to improve future implementations of the SHIB approach.
RESUMEN
The recent growth in the wearable sensor market has stimulated new opportunities within the domain of Ambient Assisted Living, providing unique methods of collecting occupant information. This approach leverages contemporary wearable technology, Google Glass, to facilitate a unique first-person view of the occupants immediate environment. Machine vision techniques are employed to determine an occupant's location via environmental object detection. This method provides additional secondary benefits such as first person tracking within the environment and lack of required sensor interaction to determine occupant location. Object recognition is performed using the Oriented Features from Accelerated Segment Test and Rotated Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features algorithm with a K-Nearest Neighbour matcher to match the saved key-points of the objects to the scene. To validate the approach, an experimental set-up consisting of three ADL routines, each containing at least ten activities, ranging from drinking water to making a meal were considered. Ground truth was obtained from manually annotated video data and the approach was previously benchmarked against a common method of indoor localisation that employs dense sensor placement in order to validate the approach resulting in a recall, precision, and F-measure of 0.82, 0.96, and 0.88 respectively. This paper will go on to assess to the viability of applying the solution to differing environments, both in terms of performance and along with a qualitative analysis on the practical aspects of installing such a system within differing environments.
