Zakljucno, potrebno je i nadalje svakodnevno raditi na prevenciji demencije, osiguravati resurse i osmisljavati strategije borbe protiv demencije, jer ce broj osoba s demencijom i u Hrvatskoj u buducnosti biti veci. No, s obzirom da se u svijetu ulažu znatna sredstva u podrucju istraživanja demencije, za ocekivati je pozitivnih pomaka, kako na podrucju terapije, rane dijagnostike, tako i na podrucju rehabilitacije osoba s demencijom. Stoga - vrijeme je na nasoj strani!

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Dementia: a public health priority

The proportion of the world’s population growing older is rapidly increasing over the last decades. With the recent progresses seen in information and communication technologies, there have been great concerns about developing personalized healthcare services that can ensure the living conditions and active aging of the elderly people. Among these technologies, we highlight and review in this work, the current state of gamification and related techniques applied to the elderly care context. Six research questions were defined to provide an overview on the current state in the development of gamified systems for elderly care through the identification of publication source types, research areas, target groups, game design elements and technologies employed and observed issues and benefits of using gamification in this context. Results have shown a great diversity in publication source types and research areas, even within the health domain. Different target groups were identified based on surrounding environment and physical and cognitive capabilities of the elderly person. Feedback, progression, rewards and social interaction enhancement are highlighted as the most relevant and frequently used game design elements for this context. Technological features observed include self-management systems, portable devices, physical robots, consoles and wearable technologies. The use of gamification techniques to support elderly people has proven to be beneficial to improve wellbeing as well as both physical, cognitive, social, and emotional state of the elderly person. Current challenges are most related with the need for traditional healthcare services to integrate gamification techniques to improve personalized healthcare and answer different necessities and adapt the support provided according to the individual capabilities of elderly people. The findings presented in this systematic literature review should be considered in the development of future personalized elderly care solutions by adapting the support provided according to interests, capabilities, necessities and contexts associated to the elderly person as a means to improve independence, health and wellbeing, capture interest and positive engagement, facilitate social interaction and decrease impact of many different medical conditions affecting older people.

A systematic review of gamification techniques applied to elderly care

Sensor-based activity recognition in the context of ambient assisted living systems: A review

Applying the concepts of technological ecosystems to the care and assistance domain is an emerging field that has gained interest during the last years, as they allow to describe the complex relationships between actors in a technologically boosted care domain. In that context, this paper presents a systematic review and mapping of the literature to identify, analyse and classify the published research carried out to provide care and assistance services under a technological ecosystems' perspective. Thirty-seven papers were identified in the literature as relevant and analysed in detail (between 2003⁻2018). The main findings show that it is indeed an emerging field, as few of the found ecosystem proposals have been developed in the real world nor have they been tested with real users. In addition, a lot of research to date reports the proposal of platform-centric architectures developed over existing platforms not specifically developed for care and services provision. Employed sensor technologies for providing services have very diverse natures depending on the intended services to be provided. However, many of these technologies do not take into account medical standards. The degree of the ecosystems' openness to adding new devices greatly depends on the approach followed, such as the type of middleware considered. Thus, there is still much work to be done in order to equate other more established ecosystems such as business or software ecosystems.

/pdf/technological-ecosystems-in-care-and-assistance-a-systematic-4cryp3ac6e.pdf

Technological Ecosystems in Care and Assistance: A Systematic Literature Review

Continuously progressing technology helps improve human living standards and make human life easier. A large portion of these developments is targeting the healthcare sector and especially in the last decade has been focused on helping elderly patients extend their independent existence in their preferred environments. In this article, we present a smart home IoT based system for elderly people and people with partial memory loss (MCI patients, dementia patients etc) which ensures their safety and provides early warnings to help them overcome small everyday problems typical for such disorders. Data is continuously collected from various ambient sensors and is used for the contextual detection of their activities. Unobtrusively monitoring the patient's behaviour in his/her home is assured as well as providing necessary data to relatives and/or caregivers. An emergency wristband is added to deal with extraordinary and dangerous situations like unexpected fall, gas/water left open in the house, etc. The developed prototype is a low-cost solution, under 100 USD, in which low energy consumption and ease of integration help greatly increase its applicability.

IoT supported smart home for the elderly

Recent studies in social robotics show that it can provide economic efficiency and growth in domains such as retail, entertainment, and active and assisted living (AAL). Recent work also highlights that users have the expectation of affordable social robotics platforms, providing focused and specific assistance in a robust manner. In this paper, we present the AMIRO social robotics framework, designed in a modular and robust way for assistive care scenarios. The framework includes robotic services for navigation, person detection and recognition, multi-lingual natural language interaction and dialogue management, as well as activity recognition and general behavior composition. We present AMIRO platform independent implementation based on a Robot Operating System (ROS). We focus on quantitative evaluations of each functionality module, providing discussions on their performance in different settings and the possible improvements. We showcase the deployment of the AMIRO framework on a popular social robotics platform-the Pepper robot-and present the experience of developing a complex user interaction scenario, employing all available functionality modules within AMIRO.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/24/7271/pdf

The AMIRO Social Robotics Framework: Deployment and Evaluation on the Pepper Robot

The increase in life expectancy and the slumping birth rates across the world result in lengthening the average age of the society. Therefore, we are in need of techniques that will assist the elderly in their daily life, while preventing their social isolation. The recent developments in Ambient Intelligence and Information and Communication Technologies have facilitated a technological revolution in the field of Ambient Assisted Living. At present, there are many technologies on the market that support the independent life of older adults, requiring less assistance from family and caregivers, yet most of them offer isolated services, such as health monitoring, reminders etc, moreover none of current solutions incorporates the integration of various functionalities and user preferences or are formally analyzed for their functionality and quality-of-service attributes, a much needed endeavor in order to ensure safe mitigations of potential critical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel architectural solution that integrates necessary functions of an AAL system seamlessly, based on user preferences. To enable the first level of the architecture's analysis, we model our system in Architecture Analysis and Design Language, and carry out its simulation for analyzing the end-to-end data-flow latency, resource budgets and system safety.

A Novel Integrated Architecture for Ambient Assisted Living Systems

With the continuous ageing of the population, the demand for different healthcare services is increasing at a fast pace. At the same time, the number of caregivers is limited and the cost of well-being is increasing. Therefore, there is a recognized need for technologies that assist elderly people in their daily activities and ensure their safety along with their social integration while maintaining a higher degree of independence. One important aspect in the development of such technologies is their easy acceptance by elderly users. Traditional human-machine interfaces have always represented a barrier for the acceptance of new devices by non-technical people in general and by elderly or people with special needs in particular. In this paper, we propose a multimodal interface designed to match the requirements of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems and to fulfill the needs of elderly people who are the main users of this interface. The interface is multilingual, it supports two languages (English and Romanian) and it can process both speech and gesture commands. The interface is developed using HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3 and integrates Google Speech Service along with other services. It is able to adapt itself to any screen size and to work flawlessly across different platforms. The interface was developed and tested within the "Artificial intelligent ecosystem for self-management and sustainable quality of life in AAL" (CAMI) project. Both the interface and the results of laboratory tests are presented in this paper.

Multimodal Interface for Elderly People

In this paper, we present the outcomes and conclusions obtained by involving seniors from three countries (Denmark, Poland and Romania) in an innovative project funded under the European Ambient As ...

An end-user perspective on the cami ambient and assisted living project

Adaptive user interfaces can be more effective in increasing accessibility of the interaction between people and systems, especially for elderly or people with different impairments such as cognitive impairments in people with dementia. There are two possible types of adaptation for interfaces: navigation and content-based adaptation. Both types of adaptation must be made based on the context (devices that are used) and on the user profile. This paper presents a method for interface adaptation using user classification. Users are classified based on their interactions with the interface.

Imad Alex Awada

Papers

The AMIRO Social Robotics Framework: Deployment and Evaluation on the Pepper Robot

A Novel Integrated Architecture for Ambient Assisted Living Systems

Multimodal Interface for Elderly People

An end-user perspective on the cami ambient and assisted living project

Adaptive User Interface for Healthcare Application for People with Dementia