Hossain M Anwar, Ahmed Dewan Tanvir
IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed. 2012 Nov;16(6):1024-31. doi: 10.1109/TITB.2012.2203313. Epub 2012 Jun 6.
The growing number of elderly population at home and abroad necessitates improved approaches to elderly care provision. Elders, often with cognitive and physical impairment, need assistance in their activities of daily living (ADLs), which is usually provided by human caregivers. As the demand for caregivers assistance increases, the shortage of traditional care resources becomes obvious. In this paper, we present the Virtual Caregiver (ViCare) framework that supports a human caregiver to monitor continuously the elderly by being aware of their surroundings. The ViCare system attempts to understand the elderly persons activities and contexts based on the data captured by the sensors placed in their environment and dynamically decides what services to provide them or whether there is a need to interrupt human caregiver depending on the type of activities. It not only minimizes the cognitive load of the human caregiver but also provides a seamless assistance to the elderly toward their improved health and well-being in their living environment. We conducted the experiments in an instrumented home environment and obtained positive results in terms of the satisfaction of the elderly, interaction event handling, caregivers acceptance and their engagement.
国内外老年人口数量不断增加，因此需要改进老年护理服务方式。老年人通常存在认知和身体障碍，在日常生活活动（ADL）中需要帮助，而这种帮助通常由人类护理人员提供。随着对护理人员帮助的需求增加，传统护理资源短缺的问题变得明显。在本文中，我们提出了虚拟护理人员（ViCare）框架，该框架支持人类护理人员通过了解老年人的周围环境来持续监测他们。ViCare系统试图根据放置在老年人环境中的传感器捕获的数据来理解他们的活动和情境，并根据活动类型动态决定为他们提供何种服务，或者是否需要打断人类护理人员。它不仅将人类护理人员的认知负荷降至最低，还在老年人的生活环境中为他们提供无缝帮助，以促进其健康和福祉。我们在配备仪器的家庭环境中进行了实验，并在老年人满意度、交互事件处理、护理人员接受度及其参与度方面取得了积极成果。
