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2021 | Book

Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Supporting Everyday Life Activities

7th International Conference, ITAP 2021, Held as Part of the 23rd HCI International Conference, HCII 2021, Virtual Event, July 24–29, 2021, Proceedings, Part II

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About this book

This two-volume set constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population, ITAP 2021, held as part of the 23rd International Conference, HCI International 2021, held as a virtual event, in July 2021.
The total of 1276 papers and 241 posters included in the 36 HCII 2021 proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 5222 submissions.

ITAP 2021 includes a total of 67 regular papers; they focus on topics related to designing for and with older users, technology acceptance and user experience of older users, use of social media and games by the aging population, as well as applications supporting health, wellbeing, communication, social participation and everyday activities.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Aging: Games and Leisure Activities

Frontmatter
The Belief in Health Benefits of Digital Play Modulates Physiological Responses to Games: A Repeated-Measures Quantitative Study of Game Stress in Older Adults Playing Different Game Genres

To create games that target older adults’ interests in engaging in cognitively-boosting activities is a rising trend. However, the novelty of the digital medium of play, as well as the implicit expectation of cognitive performance can create stressful experiences for them. To address this question, we have previously proposed an empirical framework, Affective Game Planning for Health Applications (AGPHA). Drawing on Lazarus’s Transactional Theory of Stress Appraisal and Coping, AGPHA deploys an iterative evaluation of interactions between primary appraisal (PA) and secondary appraisal (SA) of the game challenge in relation to individual beliefs, as well as cognitive and physiological abilities, to predict whether players choose to learn and master the game further. In this study, we focused on the PA of health benefits of digital games (even before the games were introduced), and showed its effect on biomarkers of stress, namely cortisol, electrodermal activity (EDA), and heart rate (HR) during play. Furthermore, we showed that physiological variations explained differences in SA of the games benefits related to mental health and cognitive stimulation, but not related to the perception of game difficulty. Finally, we showed that interactions between physiological and SA factors were more sensitive predictors of the desire to replay than physiology or SA alone. Our findings show that AGPHA provides a suitable framework for investigating complex interindividual variations in physiological and perceptual experience of different games.

Atousa Assadi, Sasha Elbaz, Najmeh Khalili-Mahani
Designing a Somatosensory Interactive Game of Lower Extremity Muscle Rehabilitation for the Elderly

Somatosensory game-based rehabilitation has recently experienced rapid increases in demand and scale in the health promotion market. However, the existing research on this topic mostly focuses on treatment efficacy rather than game usability, experience feedback, and the needs of the elderly when experiencing the games. To fill this knowledge gap, we designed a somatosensory interactive game focusing on lower extremity rehabilitation, explored the intention and motivation of elderly patients, and documented the difficulties and needs of these patients in using the game. We enrolled 15 elderly subjects with lower extremity degeneration and collected data using a one-group pre-test and post-test experiment. For the pre-test, the subjects were treated with a traditional lower extremity rehabilitation program for 1 min, followed by a 5-min questionnaire survey. Next, the subjects were asked to play the somatosensory interactive game for 1 min, followed by 15 min of post-test questionnaire survey and interview. The results showed a significant difference between the two types of rehabilitation in the us-ability constructs of “fun”, “liking”, “self-expression”, “self-understanding”, “intention”, and “fatigue” in elderly subjects with no prior rehabilitation experience, indicating that, compared to the traditional ones, the rehabilitation game performed better in introducing rehabilitation to the elders, enhancing their motivation, intention, and increasing their self-confidence. The results also showed that the status of lower extremity disease in elderly users did not affect gameplay. Lastly, we provide suggestions for further improvements in the design of the operational interface, software, and hardware of lower extremity rehabilitation-dedicated somatosensory interactive games.

Chien-Hsiang Chang, Kao-Hua Liu, Hiroyuki Kajihara, Wei-Chih Lien, Peng-Ting Chen, Atsushi Hiyama, Yang-Cheng Lin, Chien-Hsu Chen, Masahiko Inami
Tangible Chess for Dementia Patients – Playing with Conductive 3D Printed Figures on a Touchscreen

In the area of dementia care, Serious Games are seen as an opportunity to boost cognitive capabilities and to stabilize the ability to independently perform Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). We developed a Serious Game based on the popular boardgame chess to target the elderly and dementia patients through incorporating dementia relevant requirements. We analyzed multiple chess variants, which use a smaller board size with less pieces to reduce the game complexity. This results in a new chess version, that helps players to understand the core mechanics of the game and allows them to get into the flow of playing with chess figures. Included are different training scenarios as well as a virtual opponent, that adjusts towards the cognitive skill level of a dementia patient. The game’s visual appearance can be tailored to any person and preference by e.g. adjusting the board color theme to address color blindness or changing between 2D and 3D modes. Another core aspect of our game concept focuses on custom 3D printed chess pieces. They are made from conductive material and have a unique finish with additional accessories to distinguish individual pieces from each other. This results in a natural, tangible playing experience on a touchscreen device, a so-called Tangible User Interface. Besides connecting to the feeling of playing real chess, such an approach has the potential to reduce the fear towards modern devices, a well-known entry barrier for this target group. In a retirement home a small pilot study with dementia patients is performed. Furthermore, by utilizing a user-centered approach, we can identify additional insights into the concept of a supported boardgame with tangible game figures which can overcome fear towards modern technology.

Christian Eichhorn, David A. Plecher, Oleksandr Golovnya, Dorothee Volkert, Atsushi Hiyama, Gudrun Klinker
Designing a Dementia-Informed, Accessible, Co-located Gaming Platform for Diverse Older Adults with Dementia, Family and Carers

The ABLE.family project deploys disability and crip approaches and universal design, to create a platform that engages diverse older adults with dementia (OAD) and their carers in social engagement and play. Our prototyped gaming platform, created with OAD stakeholders and carers aims to decrease loneliness and despair experienced by OAD and carers during the COVID-19 pandemic, by increasing opportunities for intergenerational family engagement. Pleasurable interactions are encouraged through real-time collaborative play (e.g. art and turn based games) and real-time video-calling embedded in the platform. Our human-centered design approach works with OAD and their carer networks to design the platform interface with features that can be used to effectively collaborate, interact and produce sustainable platforms for OAD and their carer community. This project is supported generously by funding from CABHI (Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation), the Alzheimer Society of Hamilton and Halton, and MIRA (the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging); resources and spaces supporting this work are provided by Pulse Lab (funded by the Asper Foundation) and McMaster University.

Paula Gardner, Stephen Surlin, Adekunle Akinyemi, Jessica Rauchberg, Caitlin McArthur, Yujiao Hao, Rong Zheng, Alexandra Papaioannou
NEONEO Balance Ball: Designing an Intergenerational Interaction Exergame for In-home Balance Training

This paper describes a tangible interactive prototype, aiming at reducing the risk of falling in older adults and ensure their adherence to the in-home balance training. The design of the prototype derived from our research on the effectiveness of different training modes in balance. An exergame created for this prototype, appealing to youngsters, might result in them (older adults and young people) playing together. This may not only provide motivation to exercise but also a platform increasing communication between two generations, which is beneficial to older adults’ mental health. Therefore, perceiving benefits aforementioned, older adults could get more interested and even develop a long-term habit of playing such exergame. Researches had been done regarding the older adults’ perspective when designing intergenerational games or exergames. Here, our concept focuses on involving both older adults and young people to play the exergame together. In this paper, an experimental plan has been designed to gain insights from young people for better solutions to motivate them to play the game with older adults.

Emiran Kaisar, Ren Bo Ding, Ting Han, Shi Qiu
MEMORIDE: An Exergame Combined with Working Memory Training to Motivate Elderly with Mild Cognitive Impairment to Actively Participate in Rehabilitation

Chronic diseases such as mild cognitive impairment have severely affected the quality of life of the elderly worldwide, both physically and psychologically. Working memory training is an intervention method that has been widely used in clinical treatment. However, memory decline, decreased physical function and psychological resistance to the training prevent seniors from gaining an ideal training outcome. Researchers use gamification methods to help the therapists improve the effect of rehabilitation training to solve the problem. This research is based on working memory training in cognitive rehabilitation and developed an exergame for seniors with mild cognitive impairment called MEMORIDE. Using the method of participatory design (PD), researchers design the Chinese classical garden's training scene that caters to the hobbies of the elderly. Moreover, a positive feedback mechanism was used to encourage the elderly to participate actively. This study recruited 10 participants with mild cognitive impairment over 65 years old (MMSE scores between 21 and 26) who used MEMORIDE for 30-min rehabilitation training. The post-experiment interview showed that most participants had a pleasant experience and willing to continue trying this training method. The research results verified the acceptance of gamified rehabilitation training for seniors. The study proves that gamification can improve training compliance and relieve training pressure in elderly rehabilitation. In further research, longer-term experiments will be carried out to verify this training method's cognitive function enhancement effect.

Xin Li, Ting Han, Enjia Zhang, Wen Shao, Liang Li, Chenye Wu
Promoting Active Aging Through Location-Based Games: A Survey of Older Pokémon Go Players

Technologies have contributed to increase the average life expectancy, through medical care support, early diagnosis, psycho-physical-cognitive rehabilitation and, more recently, digital games, which have played a key role in the general well-being. However, the aging process embodies multiple-facets that determine the level of self-dependency on economic, social, cultural, physical, personal, behavioral and health services (WHO, 1998). Thus, this research identifies the location-based game components that can impact on active aging based on the lived experiences of Pokémon Go players aged 50 and over. This paper reports on an online survey carried out in Portugal between August and October 2020 (N = 78). Results show low and moderate degrees in Pearson’s correlations coefficient between the players’ experiences (immersion and level of game enjoyment) and the variables of active aging (0.2 < R < 0.5; p < 0.05), with the exception of accessibility issues relating to the physical environment.

Jesse Nery Filho, Ana Isabel Veloso
Fostering Senior Community-Based Cyclotourism Using Transmedia: A Proposal

The general decrease in fertility rates and the increase in longevity allow the incessant aging of the world population. Furthermore, senior citizens are becoming better consumers of tourism products, leading to the need to meet their context, demands, and preferences while avoiding overtourism. Although a boom is observed in this field, there is a lack of information and products that address cyclotourism, senior tourism and its impact on citizens’ well-being and formation of communities. Community-based tourism, alongside media convergence culture, relies on the use of information and communication tools to inform purchase decisions and reinforce the connections among people relative to both place-making and place-visiting. The purpose of this position paper is to discuss the potential of transmedia to foster participatory strategies in cyclotourism to encourage active aging. In specific, it proposes the delivery of an integrated cyclotourism experience targeted to senior citizens that result from the convergence of community-based, induced, and transmedia tourism.

Cláudia Ortet, Ana Isabel Veloso, Liliana Vale Costa
A Goal Oriented Storytelling Model for Improvement of Health Game Experiences Among Older Adults

As part of efforts to promote health game adoption among older adults, the Goal Oriented Storytelling Model (GSM) is proposed to improve their health game experiences. In GSM, coaching is presented as an approach that helps older adults with low prior experience with digital technology to nevertheless enjoy digital health games and the benefits they provide. Propp’s theory in storytelling is used to structure while persuasion, goal setting and familiarity augments the set of available coaching strategies. With GSM, a coached gameplay session is crafted on top of the Pumpkin Garden health game. This form of health game coaching is then evaluated through a small-scale phenomenological study. Effects of GSM-driven coaching were positively exhibited by our older players, proving that GSM is a viable way to coach older adults to enjoy health games.

Zhengxiang Pan, Hao Zhang, Yaming Zhang, Cyril Leung, Chunyan Miao
A Brief Study on Excessive Online Game Playing Among Older Adults

Recently, there have been increasing games designed for older adults and growing concerns about older people’s excessive online gaming. Since games require a high degree of commitment and time investment from the players to the detriment of occupational, social, and other recreational activities and relations, a few factors have been linked to excessive online gaming in older adults. We interviewed and surveyed 6 current older game users regarding their gaming behavior, living conditions, problems as consequences of gaming, and game motivations. Results indicated that older game users are significantly more likely to experience gaming-related problems and that some types of gaming motivations significantly predicted excessive gaming. Low connectedness to family, having friends with habitual gaming behavior and living in rural areas also had discriminative effects on older game users’ investment. We also give some advice about game design for older adults. The findings support the necessity of offering guidelines for older users’ game design and emphasize the importance of preventing older adults from being damaged by games specially designed for them.

Haijing Tang, Qin Gao
ZhiTu: A Smartphone Photo Managing Application for the Elderly

As an important tool of photo management, current smartphone photo managing applications are not supportive enough for the elderly. In order to provide more support for photo management to the elderly, this research designed a smartphone photo managing application called ZhiTu. Focusing on four activities of photo management, which were photo collecting, photo organizing, path recalling and photo finding, four innovative features were introduced: (1) organizing structure, (2) seeking paths, (3) sharing, (4) treatments of special photo types. The application was evaluated using the method of cognitive walkthrough. The results showed that only five of the eleven tasks evaluated were agreed consistently to be suitable for elderly people. Information expression and the understandability of conceptual model are the main problems needed to be solved before further evaluation of functions with elderly people. Nevertheless, the conceptual ideas of this application were mostly approved. Comparing to existing solutions, polished follow-up version of ZhiTu was expected to provide more friendly user experiences of smartphone photo management for the elderly.

Mei Yang, Qin Gao, Qiang Liu
Gamification Design of Health Apps for the Elderly Based on the Kano Model and Conjoint Analysis Method

With the aging of population over the world, more and more old people try to learn something about health in health apps. However, they often encounter troubles, e.g., mistake touch and unreasonable interface design. It would be useful to consider gamification design when developing health apps for the elderly. Therefore, the preference of old people for the gamification function in health apps were studied. In this paper, the functional attributes and attribute levels of gamification design were summarized according to references. Then, kano model and focus group discussion were conducted to determine the attributes and attribute levels, and conjoint analysis was used to obtain the importance of all attributes and the utility value of attribute levels . The results of data analysis show that older people of different ages and genders have different preferences for the level of attributes, but these older people have the same preference for the three attributes, which are reward function, winning status and feedback function in turn.

Tongyao Yuan, Yongyan Guo

Supporting Health and Wellbeing

Frontmatter
DemSelf, A Mobile App for Self-administered Touch-Based Cognitive Screening: Participatory Design with Stakeholders

Early detection of mild cognitive impairment and dementia is vital as many therapeutic interventions are particularly effective at an early stage. A self-administered touch-based cognitive screening instrument, called DemSelf, was developed by adapting an examiner-administered paper-based instrument, the Quick Mild Cognitive Impairment (Qmci) screen.We conducted five semi-structured expert interviews including a think-aloud phase to evaluate usability problems. The extent to which the characteristics of the original subtests change by the adaption, as well as the conditions and appropriate context for practical application, were also in question. The participants had expertise in the domain of usability and human-machine interaction and/or in the domain of dementia and neuropsychological assessment.Participants identified usability issues in all components of the DemSelf prototype. For example, confirmation of answers was not consistent across subtests. Answers were sometimes logged directly when a button is tapped and cannot be corrected. This can lead to frustration and bias in test results, especially for people with vision or motor impairments. The direct adoption of time limits from the original paper-based instrument or the simultaneous verbal and textual item presentation also caused usability problems. DemSelf is a different test than Qmci and needs to be re-validated. Visual recognition instead of a free verbal recall is one of the main differences. Reading skill level seems to be an important confounding variable. Participants would generally prefer if the test is conducted in a medical office rather than at a patient’s home so that someone is present for support and the result can be discussed directly.

Martin Burghart, Julie L. O’Sullivan, Robert Spang, Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons
A Compact Automated Tablet Dispensing & Packaging System for Community Healthcare Facilities to Provide Unit Dose Repackaging Service

Unit dose packaging is a gradually promoted medicine packaging form, which has been widely proved to improve the convenience, compliance and safety of patients. Especially for the elderly patients with chronic diseases, who need to take a variety of drugs and their cognitive ability is reduced, providing unit dose packaging is a very effective service. At present, the large-scale automatic production mode of unit dose packaging is not suitable for community healthcare facilities, while the manual mode has low safety and high workload. Therefore, on the basis of investigation and analysis, this research designed a compact automated tablet dispensing & packaging system for these facilities, and built a prototype, and tested the performance and availability of the system in the laboratory. In this way, the workload of staff will be reduced, and the level of unit dose drug packaging service provided by these facilities will be improved. In a word, designing the service-oriented products based on a wide range of existing community facilities is an enlightening innovative way for welfare for the elderly.

Yiming Chen, Zhenyu Gu
A Conceptual Design and Research of Automatic Blood Sampling Device

With the continuous development of science and technology, informatization has begun to blend into people’s daily lives. In today’s era, medical treatment has also begun to develop in the direction of digitalization and informatization. Blood sample collection is a common detection method in clinical treatment. At present, blood sample collection is still dominated by manual collection. Since the last century, there have been a number of researchers in the field of venous location and venipuncture, to assist medical personnel to carry out puncture or to achieve the purpose of robotic venipuncture. At this stage, robotic puncture is already technically possible. However, the current design of automatic blood collection device does not consider the user’s psychological level and using the process, which is easy to bring psychological pressure to the user. Therefore, from product design point of view, this project designs an automatic blood sampling device with the consideration of ergonomics and user journey. The device can not only reduce the working pressure and training cost of medical staff, but also improve the user’s experience.

Ran Chen, Jing Luo, Yan Luximon
Visualizing Wellness: The Myant Skiin System Connected Life App

This paper presents a design study of the visualization interface to the Myant Skiin Connected Life App (Skiin), a family informatics application which will connect family members, friends, and caregivers, by engaging them together and enabling health and wellness related data sharing and support. It is based on Myant’s highly accurate intelligent textiles garments which collect activity and related biomechanical data through knitted sensors on the garment. Our design seeks to deliver a seamless user experience between this complex of technologies through effective data presentation, visualization, and tool tips. One of Skiin’s differentiators is the provision of a communication overlay (the Aura) which cues users to view metrics data and engage in dialogue around its meaning. We undertook a comprehensive literature review and examination of related work that included personal informatics, mHealth applications, and family informatics – motivation and social communication, wellness standards for older adults, technology adoption by older adults, effective design, and visualization strategies to support aging individuals, their family, friends, and support team, and issues of privacy. We used iterative prototyping to build and revise the visualization interface. We discuss our visualization methods, detail the resulting Skiin application, our usability testing strategy which combines personas, Talk Aloud and SUS approaches, research outcomes, and next steps.

Sara Diamond, Ajaz Hussain, Renn Scott, Rittika Basu, Shunrong Cao, Manisha Laroia, Veda Adnani
Cognitive, Mental and Social Benefits of Online Non-native Language Programs for Healthy Older People

The older population groups are on their rise nowadays. In particular, the population aged 65 and over is growing faster than all other age groups. The purpose of this review is to investigate if there are any cognitive, mental and social benefits of online non-native language programs for healthy older people, which they may exploit in this COVID-19 pandemic. The methodology of this review was based on a literature search of peer-reviewed English written research articles found in Pub Med, Web of Science and Scopus. The findings of this review reveal that the research on the cognitive, mental and social benefits of online non-native language programs for healthy older individuals are rare. The results of this review indicate that the online non-native language programs may bring a lot of benefits for healthy elderly, especially as far as the enhancement of their cognitive (i.e. working memory) and mental (i.e. reduced depression) functions, are concerned. In fact, the stimulation of social and psychological wellbeing benefits of non-native language learning may consequently also generate multilingual cognitive gains in healthy older generation.

Blanka Klimova
A Human-Machine Interaction Solution for Household Medical Furniture Design

In the current situation of covid-19 pandemic, the supply and demand relationship of medical resources in various hospitals is unstable. However, people's needs for understanding their health status are increasing. The purpose of this project is to assist telemedicine so that people can check their health at home. So, we proposed a civilian medical furniture solution. In the solution, we took the chair design as an example. First, we found out the user’s needs and pain points via observation and interview. Based on this, we analyzed the characteristics of chair design and developed a prototype using a flexible contact sensor technology. In a follow-up evaluation experiment, we also added the details of the product according to ergonomic design principles of sitting posture. Moreover, after obtaining the heath data of users, we improved the product quality by visualizing the data. Finally, we tested the interactive effects of data visualization and then received positive feedback from users. The results of this project could help the design and development of civilian medical furniture.

Yunhui Li, Jing Luo, Qianqian Jing, Yan Luximon
System Architecture and User Interface Design for a Human-Machine Interaction System for Dementia Intervention

A growing number of older adults in America face dementia and its associated behaviors. One of the most prevalent behaviors is apathy, which leads to social isolation, reduced quality of life, cognitive decline, increased mortality and caregiver burden. Current interventions are costly and require intensive personnel resources. Given the shortage of qualified care givers, technology may be an effective and complementary approach. Research has shown that multimodal interventions that include social, physical, and cognitive activities have the best outcomes. We propose a novel system combining social robotics and virtual reality to engage older adults in tasks that target all three areas. In this paper, we describe the system architecture, which includes the Virtual system Musical Task, the social robot, the state machine, and the wand that is used as an input device. Five participants tested the system. The virtual reality and robot functioned as expected with no errors. The wand had errors below 10%. The average usability score was 89.5. Overall, this study demonstrated that the system performs as expected per the functional system requirements. Further studies are necessary to explore the functionality and usability of the system with older adults.

Miroslava Migovich, Ritam Ghosh, Nibraas Khan, Judith A. Tate, Lorraine C. Mion, Nilanjan Sarkar
LifeSenior – A Health Monitoring IoT System Based on Deep Learning Architecture

This paper proposes an efficient and reliable elderly health monitoring system based on a low power IoT communication service inside a watch type wearable device. The watch senses motion (accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer) and vital signs (heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, breathing rate, and blood volume pressure) to detect falls and other possible risk situations estimated by the EAEWS (Elderly Adopted Early Warning Scores) algorithm. Sense data collected are continuously fed into an embedded bi-LSTM (bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) deep-learning neural network that bases the LifeSenior AI (Artificial Intelligence) health monitoring system. As there are no databases with motion and vital signs collected in the same environment, we design the LifeSenior Database Project (LDP); a motion-vital signs correlated database explicitly developed to the neural network training phase. Our experimental results in a simulated environment show that this architecture presents a 84,63% of accuracy in fall situations detection and can keep the user alert about his health.

Maicon Diogo Much, César Marcon, Fabiano Hessel, Alfredo Cataldo Neto
Prediction of Sleep Quality in Live-Alone Diabetic Seniors Using Unobtrusive In-Home Sensors

Diabetes, a chronic disease that occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or when the body cannot effectively utilize its insulin, is increasingly recognized as a significant health burden and affects many older adults. Poor sleep quality in diabetic seniors worsens the diabetes condition, but most seniors are tend to regard poor sleep quality as a usual event and do not seek treatment. This study aims to detect poor sleep quality in diabetic seniors through passive in-home monitoring to inform intervention (e.g., seeking diagnosis and treatment) to improve the physical and mental health of diabetic seniors. We derive sensor-based classification models using data from motion sensors installed in each apartment zone (bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom) and a contact sensor on the main door from 39 seniors. Diabetes and poor sleep quality labeling are done based on psychosocial survey data. Our evaluation of the model reveals that (i) diabetes classification using features related to kitchen activity achieved perfect precision, (ii) sleep quality classification in diabetic seniors achieved the best results using Naïve Bayes and features related to night activity. Correlation analysis also reveals that seniors with diabetes are more likely to have poor sleep quality due to frequently voiding at night. Our findings can help community caregivers to monitor the sleep quality of diabetic seniors.

Barry Nuqoba, Hwee-Pink Tan
Development of Smartphone Based Personal Health Tracking System for Older People

With the rapid aging of China’s population, the imbalance between the needs and resources in health maintenance for the elderly is getting more and more attention. On the one hand, although most of the elderly are able to take care of themselves, the extremely high prevalence of chronic diseases makes them also need some help. On the other hand, there is a serious “empty nest” phenomenon among the elderly in China, which indicates insufficient home care. It is an effective way to alleviate this imbalance to help the elderly who have self-care ability better carry out healthy self-management. However, there is still a lack of effective interventions to guide the elderly in health self-management. Based on this idea, this study designed a personal health tracking system for the elderly based on smartphone. The system integrates needs of the elderly and medical staff, and its functions involve medical records management, physical index monitoring and daily habits developing. Design features of information products for the elderly were fully considered. After three rounds of iterative design, a high-fidelity prototype was finally proposed and all evaluation indicators performed as expected in the usability evaluation experiment.

Xuan Wang, Qin Gao
A Novel Mobile Application for Medication Adherence Supervision Based on AR and OpenCV Designed for Elderly Patients

Elderly people or individuals diagnosed in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease might have difficulty in taking medications according to the doctors’ instructions due to the vision problems or memory loss. However, medication adherence can be crucial for good health or cause a major health setback. Traditional apps for medication adherence supervision use time reminders when the doses are supposed to be taken. This paper has developed a novel Android app to track the patient’s action of taking medication for avoiding skipping the doses or taking too much medication. The app includes two modules, i.e. the AR medicine packaging box recognition module and the medication adherence supervision module. The former uses the surface of the medicine packaging box as an AR trigger and displays the virtual words of medical prescription to help the elderly patients identify the correct medications. The second module tracks the date and time of taking medications by recognizing the pills in the photo taken by the user. The pill detection is accomplished by applying the OpenCV image processing library to identify the pill contours based on dimensions and shape. Finally the pill detection tests were conducted to measure the detection accuracy and robustness of the app considering lighting conditions, different locations the pills were placed and the pills overlapped with each other.

Songlin Yang, Xiaoping Pang, Xingxi He
Elderly Sleep Support Agent Using Physical Contact Presence by Visual and Tactile Presentation

In this study, we propose an agent that guides elderly people to bed and supports better sleep through visual, voice, and tactile sense presentation. The system is mainly based on the following: 1) a visual presentation part that shows a agent approaching to bed, and getting into bed, to guide the user go to bed and sleep; and 2) a tactile presentation part that imitates the arm and body of the person lying down and that is equipped in a blanket. To draw the user to the bed in order to sleep, the agent presents a voice-like sound to notify bedtime, guides the user to the bed, and gives the user a tactile sense, such as a hug or a light tap via our blanket-type device, as though someone who cares for the user is actually there. Mental stability and sleep are expected to be drawn by the system. According to the experimental results, both the visual expression and tactile representation of simulated hugs and patting have an effect on the user’s mental stability, whereas the tactile stimulation of patting gives the user a sense of healing and comfort. Therefore, the proposed agent is considered effective to make the user comfortable.

Yaze Zhang, Xin Wan, Tomoko Yonezawa
Technology, Gender and COVID-19. Analysis of Perceived Health in Adults and Older People

This chapter aims to know the psychosocial impact and social behaviours and related to the perception of technological needs in adults and older persons with diseases, health problems and/or sensory or motor disabilities. This work delves into this reality from a gender, inclusive and, at the same time, technological, biotechnological and/or virtual device approach. This goal includes two secondary objectives: 1) To know the health conditions that affect the adult and older people, whether they suffer from chronic diseases and health problems. In this way, it will be possible to understand if there are specific conditions in which the adult and older persons have felt especially sensitive during the pandemic outbreak in Spain. 2) To understand the needs of older people with sensory or motor disabilities before the pandemic and how this connects with the looking forward to an activity after COVID-19. One conclusion is that new emerging technologies are essential in aspects such as safety, hygiene and other social factors that help to improve autonomy and independence - such as canes and support devices in functional disability type EGARA - of older persons during and after the pandemic times. In addition to the needs of adults and the older persons prior to the pandemic, especially in older women, there are others that require research from a more inclusive and gender perspective.

Vanessa Zorrilla-Muñoz, María Silveria Agulló-Tomás, Maria João Forjaz, Eduardo Fernandez, Carmen Rodriguez-Blazquez, Alba Ayala, Gloria Fernandez-Mayoralas

Supporting Communication, Social Participation and Everyday Activities

Frontmatter
MR System to Promote Social Participation of People Who Have Difficulty Going Out

This paper proposes a promotion system of social participation for people who have difficulty in going out with mixed reality collaboration technique. More than one billion population in the world are tortured by disabilities, and a majority of them have difficulties in social participation due to the unsatisfied transportation demanding. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to use a remote collaboration system based on mixed reality to help people with disabilities to join in social activities. Specifically, our system employs a pair of VR and AR HMDs as well as a $$360^\circ $$ 360 ∘ camera to create a virtual environment, where physically separated users can interact with each other immersively. Furthermore, we also equip our system with a branch of functions which can further facilitate the communications. In order to test our system, we also design a remote shopping scenario to simulate the condition where people with disabilities want to go shopping at home. The user study shows that our system can satisfy most requirements without triggering obvious discomfort.

Yanjiao Ao, Masayuki Kanbara, Yuichiro Fujimoto, Hirokazu Kato
A Synthetic Elderly Companion Named Lois

Described is a synthetic elderly companion named Lois, short for Loved One’s Information System, able to tend to an elder’s needs, monitor overall well-being and progress, detect decline and signs of further medical problems, and in general, ‘be there’ for an elder. Lois is a cognitive system comprised of computer displays, cameras, speakers, microphones, and various sensors placed throughout the home facilitating both non-invasive monitoring and highly interactive collaboration. Lois maintains a set of models enabling the recognition of events and changes of condition as well as the compiling of a historical record for later use by medical personnel and family members. Since Lois lives with the elder over an extended period of time Lois becomes tailored specifically to the elder learning their schedule, likes, dislikes, and tendencies. By working with the elder, the elder’s family members, and medical personnel, Lois is at the center of a synthetic elderly caregiver ensemble capable of performance superior to any human caregiver.

Ron Fulbright
Topic-Shift Characteristics of Japanese Casual Conversations Between Elderlies and Between Youths

To support senior citizens’ smooth conversations, we have developed a conversation support system that provides several topics for speakers. To effectively support conversation, the system should select suitable topics and speaking styles for the speakers while observing topic-shift situations regarding their previous conversations. In this study, we discuss the differences in conversation styles and topic-shift characteristics between elderlies and those between youths. A comparison of conversations of elderly people and youths revealed two distinct characteristics. The casual conversations of elderlies tended to include long utterances with the speakers firmly expressing their knowledge or opinion. By contrast, the conversations of youths did not reveal long utterances and they tended not to express their opinions at once, but only gradually, after watching the reaction of the other person. Further, elderly speakers tended to talk on a topic more in-depth and did not get sidetracked compared with young speakers. Moreover, the boundary of topics in the case of elderly people tended to be clearer than in the case of youths. As a result of generation identification experiments using “the number of utterances by each topic,” “the number of content words in each utterance,” and “the deviation of word similarity,” the precision rate for youths is 90.5% but that for elderlies is 42.2%. This suggests that these parameters are effective to extracting the young speakers with certainty.

Youtaro Iida, Yumi Wakita
An Expert Interview Study of IoT Wearable Technologies for an Aging Population from Product, Data, and Society Dimensions

This research focuses on investigating the product, data, and society dimensions around IoT (Internet of Things) wearable technologies with insights and empirical knowledge from exploratory expert interviews. The purpose is to find implications around future designs of IoT wearable technologies for the aging population. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through in-depth expert interviews and pre-surveys to explore topics and insights related to the design and development of IoT wearable technologies. Through synthesizing findings from expert interviews and pre-surveys, insights and concerning issues were summarized into three dimensions: product, data, and society. The implications from this research can help overcome the obstacles that impede the inclusiveness and adaptability of IoT wearable technologies. This study concludes that it is essential for designers, engineers, and researchers to consider these non-technological issues when designing and developing future IoT wearable technologies for the aging population.

Sheng-Hung Lee, Ziyuan Zhu, Chaiwoo Lee, Fabio Duarte, Joseph F. Coughlin
Towards Representation of Daily Living Activities by Reusing ICF Categories

The study of commonsense reasoning and robotic agents in home environments is trending considering artificial intelligence. Handling the contexts of human daily living is crucial for the system to achieve, for example, the detection of risky situations in a care facility and long-term natural dialogue with other individuals. This study aims to construct an ontology to represent daily living activities by reusing the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) categories. We extracted relevant categories from the ICF, introduced new classes, and defined an “is-a” hierarchy to provide a common vocabulary for the annotation of the context of multiple sensor data obtained in home environments. As a result, the constructed ontology consists of 284 classes. The evaluation of its coverage is performed using the following two resources related to commonsense reasoning: ATlas Of MachIne Commonsense (ATOMIC) and STAIR Actions captions. We sampled 100 sentences from each resource and described the context of the samples using the constructed ontology, which resulted in 63% and 84% of each sample being covered by our ontology. This demonstrates that our ontology has the competency to describe the context in a daily living environment. In addition, we found the types of contexts that are lacking in the ontology via the evaluation.

Satoshi Nishimura, Ken Fukuda
COVID-19 Impact of Virtual Communication During Social Isolation on Bulgarian Society

The topic of virtual communication in the context of social isolation during the spread of the new corona virus strain (SARS-CoV-2) and its associated disease COVID-19 is an extremely important scientific problem with paradigmatic dimensions and fundamental consequences for society. As a technologically mediated way of communication, it proved that during a pandemic, the virtual communication is the only alternative to traditional face-to-face communication, and its use was inevitable to partially or completely overcome the social restrictions imposed. In order to examine some of the effects of the virtual communication during the social isolation in Bulgaria, an academic research team from the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication at The St. Kliment Ohridsky Sofia University undertook a study in the declared two month’s period (13.03.–13.05.2020) of the state of national emergency in the country. The researchers conducted a three-folded study: on the sociological polls and the media coverage during the pandemics; on the activities of the telecommunication industry; and on the impacts of virtual communication during the social isolation, using mixed methodology: quantitative and qualitative survey with three groups of respondents: media users, media professionals and media experts. The results of the effects of virtual communication in social isolation were indicative.

Lilia Raycheva, Nadezhda Miteva, Neli Velinova, Mariyan Tomov
Effect of Different Secondary Tasks Types on the Driving Safety of Older Drivers

This paper studies the impact of different types of secondary tasks on older drivers’ driving safety. The study used a dual-task experimental design, the older participants need to perform three different secondary tasks while performing driving tasks on the simulated driver, including touch tasks, reading tasks, and conversation tasks. The study collected various metrics of older drivers in various distraction types of tasks, such as vehicle position, speed, acceleration, brake pedal force, distraction times and reaction time to emergencies. Results showed that the touch task has the longest reaction time and the most possibility of collision; the reading task has the largest lane offset and lateral acceleration. The indicators of the conversation task perform better than the other two tasks.

Jinjun Xia, Yi Liu, Yingjie Wang, Na Xu
Data Cleaning of Binary Sensor Events in Activity Recognition by Cluster-Based Methods

The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems use sensors to detect the daily behavior of older adults and provide necessary assistance based on changes in their cognitive status and physical functions, thus enabling older adults to maintain their independence at home. However, the effectiveness of the AAL systems depends on the accuracy of the data provided by sensors. Namely, when a human error or a hardware failure occurs, the activity recognition model can become inaccurate. This inaccuracy hinders the identification of critical and potentially life-threatening activities. Although there are many methods for cleaning sensor data, there is no method for binary sensors deployed in smart homes. By considering noisy sensor events and unintentional forgetting of turning off the device, this paper proposes two clustering-based methods for denoising and splitting binary sensor events to address possible inaccuracy due to the two mentioned problems. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified by the experiments using four machine learning models and three real-world smart home datasets and adopting different sensor configurations. The experimental results demonstrate that compared to the original unprocessed datasets, by combining the two proposed methods, the average accuracy and F-measure are improved by 15.00% and 17.25%, respectively.

Chunyang Zhao, Xia Que, Yue Yin, Xiaoman Xing, Jiaoyun Yang, Ning An
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Supporting Everyday Life Activities
Editors
Qin Gao
Dr. Jia Zhou
Copyright Year
2021
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-78111-8
Print ISBN
978-3-030-78110-1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78111-8