A Design Tool to Reason about Ambient Assisted Living Systems
📝 Abstract
This paper proposes a design tool to investigate the properties and emergent behaviours of a special class of Ambient Assisted Living systems, namely mutual assistance communities where the dwellers contribute to each other’s well being. Purpose of our system is to understand how mutual assistance communities work, what consequences a design decision could ultimately bring about, and how to construct care communities providing timely and cost-effective service for elderly and disabled people. We prove that mutual assistance between dwellers can provide care in time, and decrease the requirement for professional medical service. The simulation results show that with the existing rules most of the requirements for help can be solved or promptly initiated inside the community before their members resort to external professionals.
💡 Analysis
This paper proposes a design tool to investigate the properties and emergent behaviours of a special class of Ambient Assisted Living systems, namely mutual assistance communities where the dwellers contribute to each other’s well being. Purpose of our system is to understand how mutual assistance communities work, what consequences a design decision could ultimately bring about, and how to construct care communities providing timely and cost-effective service for elderly and disabled people. We prove that mutual assistance between dwellers can provide care in time, and decrease the requirement for professional medical service. The simulation results show that with the existing rules most of the requirements for help can be solved or promptly initiated inside the community before their members resort to external professionals.
📄 Content
A Design Tool to Reason about Ambient Assisted Living Systems
Hong Sun, Vincenzo De Florio, Chris Blondia University of Antwerp Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Performance Analysis of Telecommunication Systems group Middelheimlaan 1, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium, and Interdisciplinary institute for BroadBand Technology Gaston Crommenlaan 8, 9050 Ghent-Ledeberg, Belgium {hong.sun, vincenzo.deflorio, chris.blondia}@ua.ac.be
Abstract
This paper proposes a design tool to investigate the properties and emergent behaviours of a special class of Ambient Assisted Living systems, namely mutual assistance communities where the dwellers contribute to each other’s well being. Purpose of our system is to understand how mutual assistance communities work, what consequences a design decision could ultimately bring about, and how to construct care communities providing timely and cost-effective service for elderly and disabled people. We prove that mutual assistance between dwellers can provide care in time, and decrease the requirement for professional medical service. The simulation results show that with the existing rules most of the requirements for help can be solved or promptly initiated inside the community before their members resort to external professionals.
- Introduction
As well known, the proportion of elderly people
kept increasing since the end of last century. The
European overview report of Ambient Assisted Living
(AAL) investigated this trend [1]. The studies of
EUROSTAT [2] indicated that: “The share of the total
European population (EU 15) older than 65 is set to
increase from 16.3% in 2000 to 22% by 2025 and
27.5% by 2050. The share of the population aged over
80 years (3.6% in 2000) is expected to reach 6% by
2025 and 10% by 2050.”
Studies of Counsel and Care in UK find out that
these elderly people would prefer to live in their own
house rather than in hospitals, thus they need support
to remain independent at their home [3]. Figure 1
shows how people’s daily lives are hampered by aging
Fig. 1 Percentage of people hampered in daily activities, by age [2]
[2]. In order to improve the quality of the life for the
elderly and disabled people, it is important to
guarantee that assistance to those people should be
timely arranged in case of need.
Several researches have been undertaken already to
build intelligent care communities based on agents –
see for instance [4], [5], and [6]. In particular, in [5]
Beer developed his INCA (Integrated Community
Care) system with AUML (Agent-oriented Unified
Modeling Language), intending to develop care plans
for the elderly people. In Beer’s system, a coordinator
is responsible for preparing the plan, and different care
providers supply various services. Non-medical
services are carried out in his system by so-called
informal carers – e.g. relatives, friends, neighbours etc.
These previous researches are excellent attempts to
provide quality of life to the elderly people. In this
paper, the system we propose will also contain actors
similar to the ones deployed in the previous research.
But what is emphasized in this paper is how the system
reacts to some abrupt call for help, how to provide
these helps timely and cost-effectively and how to
increase the degree of satisfaction of the caller. The
neighbours will play an important role in this paper.
The simulations will show that the system can provide
a quick response to the requirement for help from the
availability of motivated neighbours.
- The Ambient Assisted Living System
As presented in Sect. I, elderly people need support to maintain their independent life. The call for medical treatment should be provided from the professionals in hospitals, and the call for social activities is normally provided by their relatives, friends, and neighbours. The situation in real-life is that families and friends are not necessarily located nearby, but sometimes far away. In order to provide help timely and cost- effectively, the best solution seems to resort on help from their neighbours. Neighbours are adequate for the task of social activities: they are close to the caller, thus their help could be more timely provided. Furthermore, these interactions could increase the harmony within the community. Obviously the neighbours may be also not always available, and it is also not an efficient option to call the neighbours one by one to ask for help. An important function of our AAL system is automatically requesting help when the elderly people are in need. Wireless sensors will be installed in the house or even embedded around the body of the elderly people, record their movements and trigger alarm if accidents are detected. Bayesian artificial intelligence tools will be used to capture the behavioural patterns of the user and detect possible anomalies [7]. Besides asking for help, the system w
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