Towards Dementia-friendly Smart Homes

Mohsen Amiribesheli, Hamid Bouchachia

Department of Computing & Informatics,

Faculty of Science and Technology,

Bournemouth University, UK

http://bmth.ac.uk/

IEEE COMPSAC’16 Atlanta, USA June 20161

Presentation outline

• Introduction

• Methodology

• Evaluation

• Results

• Discussion

Introduction Methodology Evaluation Results Discussion 2

Background

• Dementia is a family of chronic diseases that cause permanent and gradual cognitive decline.• One in five people will be older than 65 by 2030.

• About 3% of people aged 65 to 74, 19% of people aged 74 to 84 and nearly half of people more than 84 have dementia.

• Dementia Spectrum: • no cognitive decline, very mild cognitive decline, mild cognitive decline (Mild

Cognitive Impairment MCI), moderate cognitive decline (Mild Dementia), moderately severe cognitive decline, severe cognitive decline, and very severe cognitive decline.

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Background (cont.)

• Considering the positive impacts of ‘Age in Place’.

• Dementia care has costed the world US$ 818 billion more of which were for informal care.

• Ambient assisted living technologies such as smart homes can help the people with dementia to live independently for as long as possible.

• Smart Home includes: Physical, Communication, Data Processing, and Interface components.

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Issues

• Few Smart Homes systems have been designed explicitly for the healthcare purposes (e.g., dementia care).

• Often healthcare is considered as applications on top of existing SH platforms. • A consequence of this approach is the inadequacy and unacceptability of

generic SH systems to healthcare users.

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Approach

• The User-Centred Design (UCD)• The UCD is an umbrella term that comprises a set of design tools and

methods to involve the users of a system to specify the requirements.

• The common UCD tools are challenged by• Dementia nature

• Possible limitations of caregivers’ experiences

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The Development Steps

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Prevalent Dementia Symptoms Collection

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• The process begins by studying and collecting the existing body of literature on dementia symptoms.

• Later, the symptoms should be presented in scenario format that can be efficiently evaluated by the stakeholders.

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Scenario Development

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• Each scenario is developed as a short story based on the symptoms of each dementia stage using different personas. • The personification enhances the process of evaluation by making the

scenarios simpler to be addressed by the caregivers during the initial interviews.

• SH inability to simulate the caregivers' approaches for intervening in the PwDs' lives should be addressed. • inviting awareness, suggesting, prompting, urging, and performing.

Introduction Methodology Evaluation Results Discussion

Scenario Evaluation

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• The caregivers should evaluate and enrich them with details.• For instance, in the context of PwDs' learning difficulties, the scenarios should

be based on experiences of the caregivers. They can provide the study with information such as interacting with which home appliances are the most common cause of struggle for PwDs.

Introduction Methodology Evaluation Results Discussion

Scenarios

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• A non-exhaustive list of scenarios were collected

Requirements Elicitation

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• To elicit the functional and non-functional requirements of the SH.

• The functional requirements were determined by reformulating the scenarios as use case tables.

• Based on the raised concerns by the interviewees, three non-functional requirements of modularity, distribution and seamless integration were tackled by proposing a group of design considerations.

Introduction Methodology Evaluation Results Discussion

Use Cases

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Prototype Implementation

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• Two key components of hardware and software are needed to implement an SH system. • For hardware:

• A group of sensors (e.g., passive infra-red sensors) and a single-board computer were used.

• For the software:• A system was developed using an existing SH framework, called OpenHAB, in a way to

meet the requirements.

• The user interfaces were developed from scratch using Java script and PHP programming languages. The interfaces were adapted to mobile phones, tablets and computers.

Introduction Methodology Evaluation Results Discussion

System’s components

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Installation Settings

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Interfaces

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Interfaces (cont.)

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Prototype Evaluation

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• Obviously the system should be deployed in real-world environments and observe the stakeholders interaction.• However, before the real-world deployment, it should be guaranteed that the

system does not affect the residents' health and safety, and has potential to improve their quality of life.

Introduction Methodology Evaluation Results Discussion

Evaluation Settings

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• Five geriatric specialists participated in two 45-minute-long evaluation sessions.

• Evaluation Objectives• Does the system have the adequate monitoring capability to be installed in a

real-world setting?

• Can the system reduce the care difficulty?

• Does the system consider PwDs' health and safety?

• Can the system improve the quality of dementia care?

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Evaluation Measures

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Three measures were utilised in the questionnaires. The importance, the difficulty and effect.

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Results

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Final Results

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Discussion

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• Presumably, the SH reduces the difficulties of dementia care dramatically. • it increases the caregivers' peace of mind and allows them to spend more time on

tasks that improve the wellbeing of PwDs.

• The results suggest utilising the SH technology has a minor effect on the quality of the care responses.

• Some challenges will only be faced when the system is deployed in real-world setting. • In the next step, the SH system should be installed in a real-world environment. • For instance, the prototype flawless success in detecting the macro-contexts was

based on the fact the micro-contexts were recognised from the clean simulated data. However, in a real setting the micro-context recognition is a much more challenging task.

Conclusion

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• Discussing the context of Smart Homes for dementia care and its challenges

• Introducing a UCD-based method for designing SH for PwDs

• Presenting some dementia care scenarios

• Developing the prototype

• Evaluating the results

Questions

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Thank you