Adults Using Smart Environment Technologies

The number of individuals who live with cognitive or physical impairments is rising significantly due to the aging of the population and better medical care. In 1985, 5.5 million disabled elderly were living at home. By 2030, 70 million Americans will be 65+ and over 10.1 million of these elderly will be living at home with functional disabilities. Surveys indicate that older adults want to remain in their homes as they age despite disabilities that may compromise safety. Maintaining older individuals in their homes is also financially preferable — 40 percent of elder adults cannot even afford to live in an assisted care facility.

Placing the burden on caregivers alone is not an effective solution. Family members in the United States provide approximately $197 billion/year of “free” care. However, many of these caregivers themselves have disabilities, and this level of care degrades their own health as well as forces many caregivers to sacrifice jobs and social lives.

Can the technology sector help older adults live independently at home? A solution may be found in health-assistive technologies. Convergence of technologies in pervasive computing, artificial intelligence, and sensor networks is now making smart environments a reality, and this technology can tremendously impact and facilitate the desire of adults to age in place. We define a smart environment as an intelligent agent that is able to acquire and apply knowledge about the environment and its residents in order to improve their quality of life in that environment. Physical implementations of these smart environments can be found in projects such as MavHome, the Gator Tech Smart House, the iDorm, the Georgia Tech Award Home, the Adaptive Home, and the Home Depot Smart Home.

With the maturing of supporting technologies, at-home automated assistance can allow people with mental and physical challenges to lead independent lives in their own homes. Some of these technologies focus on assurance, or making sure our friends and loved ones are safe and healthy at home. In particular, software that supports smart environments can use collected sensor data to recognize tasks that residents are performing. This is beneficial for recognizing whether adults are completing essential ADLs (Activities for Daily Living). By tagging food packages, medicine dispensers, and key pieces of furniture with RFID tags, smart environments can also monitor the resident’s diet, medication and exercise routines. Once a model of daily activities is learned, the smart environment can detect long-term changes or trends, and identify sudden changes or anomalies that may pose a health concern. If a health-critical situation is encountered the smart environment can contact the caregiver and intervene with automated assistance (e.g., turn off the bathwater).

The next category of health technologies targets the goal of providing support to individuals with cognitive or physical impairments. Using the learned model of planned or regular daily activities, the smart environment can remind residents of their normal tasks or the sequence of steps that comprise these tasks (such as hand washing). Devices such as the activity compass  can remind users of the route that will get them back to a safe location if they have wandered off. For those with physical limitations, automation of their home and work environment can allow them to control their physical environments without requesting assistance from caregivers.

Continue to read article at IEEE