Ambient Assisted Living

In this paper, we present results from the VERA project regarding design, usability, and motivation for long-term usage of a mobile web app platform that encourages physical and mental activity. The system is designed for elderly inhabitants of senior residences to motivate them to increase their physical and mental activity in everyday life. Activities can be logged in five different categories: everyday activities, endurance, strength, mental, and special activities. The data of a residential home and an assisted living facility and a total of 29 users were analyzed. The results show insight view about the usage and suggest that accompanying help can improve the long-term sustainability of the motivating effect.

In this paper, we present an approach for model-based movement and posture classification in working environments. The approach presented here is designed for long-term in-situ observations of and by workers in their workplaces. The proposed model is adaptable to different input data, e.g., skeleton data from either an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) or a skeleton derived from an optical sensor such as Kinect. We present a preliminary design of the model and suggest algorithms suitable for real-time usage of the model in an IMU-based motion capture suite. In an experiment we measured the weight on the knee while performing different kneeing postures to show the dependence of posture angles on the knee load.

This document describes a method to measure geriatric assessment data by using a mobile robotic platform that is able to track and analyze human motion parameters. The information gathered by this system can be used to assess the user’s health status. Geriatric mobility assessments conducted by a mobile robot provide significant advantages over current methodologies. For example, sensor data can be used to track multiple assessments at once. Additionally, the robot navigation capabilities can be enhanced by the use of geriatric assessment data. This paper concentrates on the movement analysis aspect of the whole system due to the limited space.

We present an evaluation of two approaches to the problem of inferring the presence of multiple persons in networks of binary sensors. This problem is critical for many applications of Ambient Assisted Living that benefit from knowledge of single- and multi-person presence where data is collected using ambient sensors. Both approaches make use of a graph representing sensors and their spatial relations. One approach uses a simple statistical method to derive a minimum number of people present, the other precisely tracks people through the sensor network. Both approaches are evaluated in a low and higher resolution setting on data of two persons inhabiting a laboratory equipped with motion sensors and contact sensors. Although the latter approach performs well tracking multiple persons, its inability to distinguish inactivity and absence make the former approach more suitable for this task, independent of resolution.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) tries to keep up user’s independence by means of applying technology, i.e., it collects, aggregates, and analyzes data recorded by a plethora of different sensors and controls actuators of a comparable variety. Setup and functionalities are various and can involve third parties as well as communication with service providers. Thereby, the category of data within the AAL system might require compliance to legislative regulations, e.g., if personal (identifiable) information is handled. Within this paper we provide an overview of the potential legal basis and requirements which are often applicable within the context of AAL systems, a.o., the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and its transformations into national legislations, respectively, and describe the conditions for a legitimate data processing in terms of informed user consent. Furthermore we describe a structured approach for AAL system analysis, which is based on BSI standards which supports in identifying the necessary information security measures in accordance to data protection requirements.

The elderly can be considered as an important labor force for future industrial development in Germany, in particular in the context of design and production of value-added personalized products/services that demand skilled and experienced labor. In this context, the project USA² developed, classified, and evaluated scenarios for the utilization of cloud manufacturing technologies and developed and prototyped an exemplar future assistive workstation for the elderly allowing them to produce personalized products decentrally and close to the customer. This article outlines the methodological approach of the project and the prototyped key subsystems and discusses relevant aspects of development and evaluation.

We are interested in an alternative to “built-in one-size-fits-all” user interfaces for appliances and services in intelligent environments. The ISO/IEC 24752 Universal Remote Console (URC) technology provides an open box that can connect arbitrary users with arbitrary appliances and services. Its core is the Universal Control Hub (UCH), a middleware providing standardized abstract interfaces that serves as a contract between a personalized user interface and the appliances/services. The UCH allows for “plugging” a new user interface into the abstract interface to adapt it to the user’s needs. Whereas the URC approach applies to intelligent environments in general (IoT, IoS), it has shown to be particularly useful when accessibility is a mandatory requirement. In order to foster an ecosystem that allows for sharing third-party resources, the Open URC Alliance has been founded. However, third-party resources are potential threats, which can harm the platform, its connected appliances, and even other resources involved. In fact, we are convinced that future usage of networked technologies, such as the URC technology, will not be possible unless a user will trust it. In this paper, we describe a pioneering effort by which we through a security-by-design approach along the prescriptions of the ISO/IEC 15408 common criteria (CC) methodology systematically develop and implement a secure UCH that guarantees fundamentally necessary security–privacy–trust properties, such as access control, role concepts, correct transportation of sensitive data, etc. The implementation is targeting a certification on the evaluation assurance level 4, that is, Methodically Designed, Tested and Reviewed.

This paper builds on the experiences made with regard to ethical and socio-legal issues in already completed and on-going AAL projects and presents the plan for integrating ethical and legal dimensions into an upcoming field trial in two residential care facilities in Austria. We describe the SignAAL project and its evaluation plan, identify the typical ethical and legal dimensions that must be taken into account in planning long-term field trials with potentially vulnerable users, and introduce methods for integrating ethical and socio-legal frameworks in the project’s approach to evaluation and field trials. Research work that relies on prototypes raises somewhat different ethical and legal concerns than the commercial adoption of available AAL products/systems/services, therefore this contribution deliberately limits its focus to the evaluation of a prototype system in a field trial in a real-life setting. The context is night care in residential care facilities for older people and older people with dementia.

In the context of AAL it will get more and more important to know about AAL technologies for skilled employees who will be confronted with AAL technologies in the future. Therefore, we designed a further education that addresses two professional groups: Persons with a social and technical working background among which we want to enhance an exchange. In the following, we present main results of the accompanying evaluation concerning network aspects and the two-way exchange among the participants of our further education.

The ability to maintain social contacts and to stay in touch with relatives and friends is an important aspect of independent living. In this work we have investigated an intuitive way to enable and facilitate communication between generations. The Chat-Machine is a cross generation communication device that allows elderly people to send digital messages to related people just with pen and paper, providing also a return channel to receive messages and pictures. This new simple way of interaction with Internet messaging services empowers elderly people to keep up easily with the new technologies and avoid exclusion from popular (social) web services. The design has been thoroughly adapted to the user group in an interdisciplinary, scenario-based design and prototyping process. Finally, a group of AAL experts has evaluated the usability and benefits of this new device.

Within this work a novel input device is described which enables direct control of a seven DOF robot arm with head motions. Head motions were measured using an inertial measurement unit with integrated signal processing. The proposed control structure was tested with five able-bodied subjects and a tetraplegic. The usability of the system was evaluated on the basis of a questionnaire. All the subjects, including the tetraplegic, were able to complete the control task during first-time use. These results show that the proposed interface may be a promising alternative to existing interfaces.