Dementia Care Frameworks and Assistive Technologies for Their Implementation: A Review.

In this review, we focus on the various integrated care models that have been applied for the management of dementia patients. We explore the different types of assistive technologies (mobile, wearable, and home-based systems) for dementia care, with a special emphasis on technologies that involve or target the informal caregiver as end user. In an attempt to reveal the needs for information sharing, communication, and collaboration between people with dementia and caregivers involved in the effective and integrated management of the disease, we analyze the trends in research and development to date, we seek to understand and reflect upon the state of the art in assistive technologies for dementia, and we highlight domains that appear underexplored, in order to guide future research. We also explore the cost effectiveness of such technologies and integrated care models for the management of dementia patients and comment on current limitations and future trends and directions. Findings indicate the urgent need and the current lack of a comprehensive and cost-effective solution that will incorporate information system technologies for the provision of integrated care services to dementia patients and their informal caregivers.

Estimating normal and abnormal activities using smartphones.

The main objective of this study is to propose a computational pipeline for the recognition of normal and abnormal activities based on smartphone accelerometer data. Methods and techniques that have been previously evaluated are further evolved and applied for the recognition of a large set of separate activities as well as a sequence of activities simulating a common scenario of daily living as a more realistic approach. For these purposes, the MobiAct dataset which encompass a set of normal activities of daily living (ADLs) and abnormal activities (falls) was used. The results show a classification accuracy of 99% for the recognition of separate ADLs, while a reduction of 5% is observed for the recognition of the scenarios.