CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In this chapter we will introduce our proposal of an Assistive Home Care System, specially designed for chronically ill or elderly people. The statistics and surveys of the WHO (OMS, 2014) reveal an increasing in life expectation (expecting 400 millions of population over 60 years old at 2050), longer treatments for chronic diseases as cancer, prevalence of Alzheimer?s disease and dementia, which leads to an increase in health costs and a social problem for personal care and hospitalization.Men and women in their older ages suffer increased fragility, incapacity, chronic illness and dependency. Several attempts of remote health monitoring can be found in literature, such as commercial systems for domotic purposes. The system herein proposed has significant differences with these approaches, because of it was created especially for people with special needs and poor familiarity with technology. The system combines home monitoring of physiological and emotional states through a set of wearable?s sensors, user-controlled (automated) home devices, and adapted Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI) in order to provide a safe and friendly environment according with the limited capabilities of the users. The main objective is to create the easy, low-cost automation of a room or house to provide a friendly environment that enhances the psychological condition of immobilized users. Also, the complete interaction of the components provides an overview of the physical and emotional state of the user, building a behavior pattern that can be supervised by the caregiving staff.The main core is an ichnographic software (SICAA, for the Spanish Sistema Integrado de Control y Automatización Asistida) that commands peripheral devices (lights, curtains, bed and other home appliances) through a customized and isolated control board, communication tools (nurse alarm, voice synthesizer, mail, chat, games and so on) and receives information from human-computer interfaces, wearable and environmental sensors (temperature, video recording for facial micro expressions and mobility, audio, and others).Regarding the HCI, the major requirements are non-invasiveness, low cost, robustness and adaptability for different users with reduced capabilities. So, whatever the incapacity that the user has, it is possible to provide alternative ways to SICAA control. Physiological monitoring is a valuable tool for nonintrusive assisted living, caregivers and remote healthcare services. The constant development of mobile technologies and electronic miniaturization allows the mobility and independence of the patients, improving their quality of life. However, a challenging issue is the integration of physiological signals with the patient´s environmental and social context to obtain a complete framework of the emotional states. A system like SICAA allows a multimodal approach, with biological variables, speech and video recording of the user and the analysis of their relation with daily activities.A wearable system must fulfill some design conditions like data storage, wireless connection, battery life, portability, versatility, and the capability of connecting more sensors, among others. The proposed system consists of a master module (for reception, synchronization, packaging and wireless transmission of data to the SICAA node) that uses Low Energy Bluetooth (BLE) reception and WiFi transmission to the SICAA software. Inertial sensors for activity level, Pulse Oximetry(SpO2), heart rate (Hbpm) and temperature can be acquired and processed in slaves sensors, and send to the master module by BLE. Also, the voice acquisition for emotions appraisal is made by a Bluetooth microphone.For chronically ill and elderly people the emotional awareness is a major concern because they are a susceptible population to mental illness . There is a recent worldwide interest in this field for the enhancement of the interaction capabilities in order to remain close to the scenarios in which human being improves their quality of life. In terms of the recent advances in research, the universality of the emotion has been widely demonstrated and the physiological processes also related to several strategies for emotion recognition in facial micro expressions , voice and the dynamic behavior of the emotions from the psychological to the mathematic/engineering point of view. Up to here, we are capable to extract emotions from physiological signals and we are willing to relate them to the emotional states of people. By monitoring such variables in SICAA, we look for a complete framework of the emotional and physiological states and by combining this information with the natural language processing will be possible to reach a set of control actions that allows the disabled/elderly people to maintain a life style in the best conditions not only to interact but also to increase their quality of life.

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