The Pursuit of Flow in the Design of Rehabilitation Systems for Ambient Assisted Living

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthea M. Middleton ◽  
Tomas E. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Pervasive Computing ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Skill Training ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Medical Rehabilitation ◽  
Current Survey ◽  
Full Immersion ◽  
Psychological Sense ◽  
Control Feedback ◽  
Evaluation Techniques

This review paper gathers together the key sources on the science of engagement and immersion, in particular the concept of flow. Flow is a psychological description for full immersion in an activity. It provides a useful framework within which to understand the coupling between pervasive computing and end users. The article discusses the concept of flow in a general psychological sense and extracts those features relevant to gaming, and in particular the human-computer interaction (HCI) aspect of such systems. The requirements for achieving flow such as reward, situational control, feedback and clarity of purpose as applicable to a pervasive computing environment are discussed in detail. The primary application focus of flow in this paper lies in the area of ambient-assisted living solutions for rehabilitation purposes. In the context of using virtual environments to aid in skill training or medical rehabilitation, dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) and enjoyment are two key elements used to create a fully immersive experience. This paper both reviews the techniques for creating these elements and describes possibilities for harnessing related methods as evaluation techniques for immersion in HCI-based rehabilitation environments, which may offer an alternative to current survey-based mechanisms.

scholarly journals Co-Designing Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Environments: Unravelling the Situated Context of Informal Dementia Care

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy S. Hwang ◽  
Khai N. Truong ◽  
Jill I. Cameron ◽  
Eva Lindqvist ◽  
Louise Nygård ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Pervasive Computing ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Participatory Design ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
System Support ◽  
Care Experience ◽  
Everyday Activities ◽  
Age In Place ◽  
Care Partners ◽  
Do It Yourself

Ambient assisted living (AAL) aims to help older persons “age-in-place” and manage everyday activities using intelligent and pervasive computing technology. AAL research, however, has yet to explore how AAL might support or collaborate with informal care partners (ICPs), such as relatives and friends, who play important roles in the lives and care of persons with dementia (PwDs). In a multiphase codesign process with six (6) ICPs, we envisioned how AAL could be situated to complement their care. We used our codesigned “caregiver interface” artefacts astriggersto facilitate envisioning of AAL support and unpack the situated, idiosyncratic context within which AAL aims to assist. Our findings suggest that AAL should be designed to support ICPs in fashioning “do-it-yourself” solutions that complement tacitly improvised care strategies and enable them to try, observe, and adapt to solutions over time. In this way, an ICP could decide which activities to entrust to AAL support, when (i.e., scheduled or spontaneous) and how a system should provide support (i.e., using personalized prompts based on care experience), and when adaptations to system support are needed (i.e., based alerting patterns and queried reports). Future longitudinal work employing participatory, design-oriented methods with care dyads is encouraged.

scholarly journals AAL Middleware Infrastructure for Green Bed Activity Monitoring

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filippo Palumbo ◽  
Paolo Barsocchi ◽  
Francesco Furfari ◽  
Erina Ferro
Keyword(s):  
Pervasive Computing ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Signal Strength ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Wireless Sensor ◽  
Sleep Monitoring ◽  
Sensor Devices ◽  
Service Oriented ◽  
Computing Environments

This paper describes a service-oriented middleware platform for ambient assisted living and its use in two different bed activity services: bedsore prevention and sleeping monitoring. A detailed description of the middleware platform, its elements and interfaces, as well as a service that is able to classify some typical user's positions in the bed is presented. Wireless sensor networks are supposed to be widely deployed in indoor settings and on people's bodies in tomorrow's pervasive computing environments. The key idea of this work is to leverage their presence by collecting the received signal strength measured among fixed general-purpose wireless sensor devices, deployed in the environment, and wearable ones. The RSS measurements are used to classify a set of user's positions in the bed, monitoring the activities of the user, and thus supporting the bedsores and the sleep monitoring issues. Moreover, the proposed services are able to decrease the energy consumption by exploiting the context information coming from the proposed middleware.

Ambient Assisted Living Systems: The Scope of Research and Development

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Ashish D Patel ◽  
Jigarkumar H. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Living ◽  
Independent Living ◽  
Intelligent Systems ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Smart Devices ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Aged Population ◽  
The People ◽  
Living Person

The aged population of the world is increasing by a large factor due to the availability of medical and other facilities. As the number grows rapidly, requirements of this segment of age (65+) are increasing rapidly as well as the percentage of aged persons living alone is also increasing with the same rate due to the inevitable socio-economic changes. This situation demands the solution of many problems like loneliness, chronic conditions, social interaction, transportation, day-to-day life and many more for independent living person. A large part of aged population may not be able to interact directly with new technologies. This sought some serious development towards the use of intelligent systems i.e. smart devices which helps the people with their inability to use the available as well future solutions. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is the answer to these problems. In this paper, issues related to AAL systems are studied. Study of challenges and limitations of this comparatively new field will help the designers to remove the barriers of AAL systems.

scholarly journals Contactless Interactive Fall Detection and Sleep Quality Estimation for Supporting Elderly with Incipient Dementia

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-391
Author(s):  
Roman Siedel ◽  
Tobias Scheck ◽  
Ana C. Perez Grassi ◽  
Julian B. Seuffert ◽  
André Apitzsch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sleep Quality ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Ambient Assisted Living ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Quality Estimation ◽  
Emergency Situations ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
Affected Person ◽  
Development State ◽  
Current Behaviour

AbstractIn recent years, the demographic change in conjunction with a lack of professional caregivers led to retirement homes reaching capacity. The Alzheimer Disease International stated that over 50 million people suffered from dementia in 2019 worldwide and twice the amount will presumably be effected in 2030. The field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) tackles this problem by facilitating technical system-aided everyday life. AUXILIA is such an AAL system and does not only support elderly people with dementia in an early phase, but also monitors their activities to provide behaviour analysis results for care attendants, relatives and physicians. Moreover, the system is capable of recognizing emergency situations like human falls. Furthermore, sleep quality estimation is employed to be able to draw conclusions about the current behaviour of an affected person. This article presents the current development state of AUXILIA.

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