Spinning off Gerotechnology Business Activities

Aging is an economic and societal challenge for the 21st century in Europe. With the percentage of elderly increasing, the national health and social care services face the need to adapt the increased costs. In this chapter, LLM service is going to be described as it comes in response to market research in the area of ICT, providing an opportunity for seniors to improve their cognitive and physical condition and continue to feel active members of society. The objectives of LLM Care are: Establishing a self-financing project. Utilizing existing infrastructure (Marketing, Financial, Management and IT) of the research institution from which it emerged (Research Committee of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). Deploy a network of organizations and stakeholders that will support seniors with Alzheimer's disease as the first customers in the first year of operation. Become established as a self-sustained, viable company in Greece developing future LLM services in the Greek market for homes, care centers and medical healthcare facilities.

Instrumenting the eHome and Preparing Elderly Pilots

In this chapter the lessons learnt from the build-up and integration of the USEFIL are demonstrated. First an introduction to Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) platforms, the infrastructure for eHomes of any purpose eHome is presented, in the context of their emergence as a viable way for managing healthcare costs in an aging first world population. Then technical and sustainability issues that are present after several years of maturation are touched upon. The USEFIL project's aim at an AAL platform that utilizes low cost “off-the-shelf” technologies in order to develop immediately applicable services, to assist elderly people in maintaining an independent, healthy lifestyle and program of daily activities is then briefly discussed. Afterwards, the methodological framework as well as principal results of the preparation and running of the pre-piloting phase of that platform are presented. Closing, current trends are explored in conjunction with future directions as triggered by this project in the context of cognitive impaired elderly support.

Assistive Technologies for People with Dementia

This chapter focuses on the presentation and discussion of available assistive tools for people with dementia symptoms and cognitive decline, leading to the conclusion that these tools may, nowadays, will be replaced by mobile applications for smart devices. A functional mobile prototype assistive application for android platform devices like smartphones, tablets and smartwatches is presented, with features that offer support to the basic needs of caregivers and people with cognitive decline, giving more emphasis on people with early Alzheimer's disease symptoms. It is shown that, utilising the available technology, as well as existing literature and empirical knowledge, mobile applications may offer a serious alternative to currently available assistive tools, while also offering considerable functionality advantages.

Implementing Cognitive Exercises in Electronic Form for Supporting Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

Main goal of this chapter is the development of computerized cognitive exercises for rehabilitation of patients with Alzheimer's disease. More specifically, in traditional rehabilitation settings cognitive exercises are administered by using the paper-and-pencil procedure. This chapter is focused on the transferring of these interventions to an electronic form, enriched with multimedia and interactions that cannot be achieved in the printed form. The presented work tries to automate the procedure and facilitate the psychologist's work. Computer-based intervention programs can exploit all the possibilities of adjusting the difficulty levels of exercise, the speed, the images, using audible signals, accelerating the processing of results for psychologists and much more that add value to creation of such programs. This chapter explores whether and how this kind of exercises can be successfully transferred in an electronic form.

Reviewing Home Based Assistive Technologies

Population ageing is an unprecedented challenge for human societies, which recently is globally tackled by new technologies. In this chapter technologies tailored for use by the elderly people termed ambient assisted living and e-health are discussed. Focus is only placed on those technologies that can be adapted for home use. Emphasis is drawn both on the technical front as well as on the application front based on recent literature. The scope is to make sure the audience reaches a sufficiently broad understanding of what technology is available for home use by elderly people. Applications and research efforts spent but also funded at the European level with a clear focus on those supported by elderly trials are provided. The chapter is enriched with case studies from various projects.

Decision Support in the Elderly Healthcare

Ambient assisted living environments comprise of “smart” components that play the role of a “guardian angel” for the seniors. Health monitoring algorithms have been widely presented in the literature, however in most of the cases, they examine contextual information and the production of alerts in case of an emergency. This short-term information, needs to be combined also with respective analysis in the long run. Integrating both types of temporal information regarding the health status of seniors, one can safeguard that both emergency detection and early diagnosis of health deterioration would lead to increase feelings of safety and quality of life to baby boomers. This chapter aims at presenting the open questions regarding health monitoring in AAL environments and proposes an approach that combines both contextual and long-term trends to characterize overall health.

Enabling Accessibility Features in Enhanced VR Environments for Supporting Spatial Abilities and Social Interaction in Elderly and MCI Patients

This chapter addresses the critical issue of usability evaluation of interfaces by elderly users and the accessibility limitations concerning the infotainment domain of virtual spaces. The main idea behind this research is to achieve a shift in more adaptive HCI used in infotainment applications and in particular in socially aware 3D Virtual Environments (Metaverses) like Second Life. Among the main goals of the present work is to examine the ability of older persons and users with Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) that are familiarized with computers and VR environments, to access and navigate effectively through realistic scenarios based on daily simple activities. Findings propose better design practices for industrial HCI engineers to enhance the quality of interaction with Metaverses by customizing both the immersive and 2D interfaces to the needs and preferences of the special user groups mentioned before.

Unobtrusive Wearable Technology for Health Monitoring

There are a number of situations in the context of health and wellness where it is desirable to monitor a user for a period of time – either for short term assessment or longer term monitoring. It is further desirable, especially for long term monitoring, that the device chosen to do so has a minimal impact on the user. This form of monitoring is unobtrusive monitoring and uses wearable technology to achieve its aims. This chapter presents an overview of unobtrusive monitoring using wearable devices, discusses some common device types and the data that are available and makes some recommendations for factors to consider when choosing or designing a device for unobtrusive monitoring.

Unobtrusive Smart Environments for Independent Living and the role of Mixed Methods in Elderly Healthcare Delivery

In this chapter the authors describe a novel approach to healthcare delivery for the elderly as adopted by USEFIL, a research project which uses unobtrusive, multi-parametric sensor data collection to support seniors. The system is based on everyday devices such as an in-mirror camera, smart TV, wrist-mountable personal communicator and a tablet computer strategically distributed around the house. It exploits sensor data fusion, intelligent decision support for carers, remote alerting, secure data communications and storage. A combined quantitative and qualitative knowledgebase was established and analysed, target groups were established among elderly prospective users and scenarios were built around each group. Use cases have been prioritised according to quantitative functional and non-functional criteria. Our research findings suggest that an unobtrusive system such as USEFIL could potentially make a significant difference in the quality of life of elderly people, improve the focus of provided healthcare and support their daily independent living activities.

A Review of Interventions with Assistive Technologies for Patients with Cognitive Impairment

Advances in technology in the last decade have created a diverse field of applications for the care of persons with cognitive impairment. This chapter is an attempt to review these advances in a systematic way, and focuses on observations of current software engineering systems (computer based assistive interventions) that contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of patients with cognitive problems. Nevertheless a holistic approach has been attempted, in order to view the research themes and applications that currently exist around the “intelligent systems” healthcare given to the cognitively impaired persons, thus looking at research directions, systems, technological frameworks and trends.