Funding programme:
NSERC - SRO (Canada)

Project description:
Researchers are struggling to search for new technology to help a fast growing population of seniors in most western countries. According to Statistics Canada, there were an estimated 3.7 million individuals aged 65 and over in Canada in 1998, making up 12% of the total population of that year. In 2006, British Columbia will have more seniors than youth under 15 years of age. These demographics are expected to grow even more rapidly during the next several decades, and the problems caused by the aging population are becoming a major social challenge. Although it is usually difficult for seniors to maintain independence especially when their spouse dies and they are left alone, seniors with mild to medium dementia can often still lead relatively normal lives if they are monitored and receive assistance in time. The objective of the MALAPO project is to develop personal object technologies with ambient intelligence that can fulfill this task of monitoring and assistance. An APOT (Assistive Personal ObjecT) is a small device carried by seniors to passively monitor its owner's daily routine and provides assistance when it detects abnormalities and signs of confusion. This project includes three major research and development themes under its umbrella: architecture and platform development, application development and usability evaluation, and protocol design for information security in the ambient intelligent environment. (a) In the first aspect, we aim to design and implement system architecture with existing wireless and sensor technologies to support application development of mobile assistive living. The main challenge is to support smooth information transition over heterogeneous wireless systems and inter-connection between the APOT and other ambient intelligent systems such as a location tracking system. (b) In the second aspect, we focus on the software development and evaluation, including major functions such as passive monitoring, anomaly detection, and assistance provisioning. The monitoring function utilizes a set of context sensors to obtain the owner's critical information, e.g., high heartbeat rate, sudden acceleration (falling down), etc. The monitored data is compressed on the APOT and sent via the mobile wireless network to an MALAPO server. The anomaly detection component sits in the MALAPO server and uses machine learning technologies to detect significant derivation of the owner's normal personal routine. Once anomaly is detected, various assistive functions can be triggered based on the severity of the derivation. For instance, the APOT may remind the patient about his/her typical plan in this situation (what to do next and how to do it); the APOT may alert helpers in the proximity around the patient; the APOT may automatically connect to a family member of caregiver in a care facility; the APOT may alert emergency services and report on the situation of the patient (identity, location, reason for alert, etc). (c) The third research theme is targeted at providing privacy protection for personal health data over resource-constrained mobile wireless networks. New secure protocols must be designed to reduce the computational and communication costs. With recent advancements in wireless technology, the once simple cell phones can be found virtually everywhere and can now be used for a myriad of different applications, ranging from normal phone services, audio/video communication, Internet browsing, to even live video broadcasting. Such technology advancements provide service providers with unprecedented opportunities of delivering diverse and quality services to their customers. Many telecommunication companies have invested to substantially promote wireless services, and their success was phenomenal. Yet, over their existing infrastructure, there are still lots of uncultured service areas that have profound social impact. One is to assist senior people for a better life, which is the main goal of our hereby proposed project. We envision that a telecommunication company's cellular infrastructure, diverse wireless messaging systems (voice, email, data, paging, etc), and adaptable network solutions, will lay the solid technical foundation to this project.

Description of work:
Hardware prototype construction Evaluation and empirical study of prototypes Legal, ethical and privacy policy research Integration of biometric sensors for monitoring patients