Ângelo Costa

Memory Support in Ambient Assisted Living

Human collective set of experiences makes us who we are and help us delineate a path for our ongoing life. Ageing, however, progressively limits our ability to save, in our internal memory, these same experiences, or, at least, limits our capability to remember them. The capability to remember, intrinsic to our memory, is a very important one to us, as a human been, being this what deferent’s us from several other species. In this paper we present a memory assistant sub module of a bigger project, the VirtualECare, which ability will be to remember us, not our past experiences, but our routine day-to-day tasks and activities, in a somehow proactive manner, thus, allowing us to have some relaxation about them, and focus the remaining of our ability in most important facts.

Multi-agent Personal Memory Assistant

Memory is one of our most precious goods has it gives us the ability to store, retain and recall information thus giving a meaning to our past and help us to envision our future, dreams and expectations. However, ageing decreases the capacity of remembering and the capacity to store new memories, thus affecting our life quality. These presented problems configure a social and human dilemma. With the presented work we intend to address some of these problems, thru the use of the Personal Memory Assistant (PMA) concept in order to help its user to remember things and occurrences in a proactive manner. We will also address socialization and relaxation events that should be part of the user’s life. With the use of a Multi-Agent System to implement the PMA, the objectives can be achieved in a ubiquitous and highly configurable manner. It is presented here the platform concept, scheme and the agent characteristics and their contribution to each and every agent.

Orientation System for People with Cognitive Disabilities

In health care there has been a growing interest and investment in new tools to have a constant monitoring of patients. The increasing of average life expectation and, consequently, the costs in health care due to elderly population are the motivation for this investment.However, health monitoring is not only important to elderly people, it can be also applied to people with cognitive disabilities. In this article we present some systems, which try to support these persons on doing their day-to-day activities and how it can improve their life quality. Also, we present an idea to a project that tries to help the persons with cognitive disabilities by providing assistance in geo-guidance and keep their caregivers aware of their location.

A Memory Assistant for the Elderly

In the present-day the ageing population is not receiving the proper attention and care they need, because there aren’t enough healthcare providers to everyone. As the elderly relatives have less time to take care of them the healthcare centers are without any doubt insufficient for all, for these reasons there is an extra pressure or demand on the healthcare sector. Focusing on the elderly care, as the human capacity of memorizing events decreases over time, it is intended to promote an active ageing lifestyle for the elderly, where memory assistance tools are vital component. In this paper, it is presented an scheduler which takes charge of the day-to-day tasks and the user agenda.

Using Mobile Systems to Monitor an Ambulatory Patient

Medical diagnostics and vital signs monitoring demands more technological solutions to cope with new methods of treatment. Continuous monitoring and information processing tools are vital to a physician with several patients under his care. In this work, a system that relies on agents and mobile and wireless devices is presented. Its use with small scale sensors allows to collect and analyse vital data in real-time, triggering appropriate reactions in case of eminent danger. This includes real-time notifications to practitioners. In cases in which the physician is unable to divide his attention among all his patients, the system is able to drive his attention to one patient only and, when it is necessary, to another one, according to their medical state. This concept represents a breakthrough in terms of the physician’s time and task management, being possible to apply it two major scenarios: patient recovery in a hospital environment or elderly living alone in a domestic environment. In that sense, we present a brief contextualiation of the problem as well as the architecture and technologies used to implement the proposed work.

An Intelligent Multi-Agent Memory Assistant

World population is ageing and increasingly scarce resources are required to cover the needs of everyone adequately. Medical conditions, especially memory problems, restrict the daily life of a broad slice of the elderly population, affect their independence. To prevent this, providing the right care and assistance while having in mind the costs implicated is essential. One possible path is to work with resources that we already have today and create innovative solutions to achieve the required level of support. There are not many solutions either technological or not to prevent memory loss. In this work we present a possible solution aimed at restoring or maintaining the independence of elderly people, through the use of so-called Memory Assistants. We thus present an Intelligent Multi-Agent Memory Assistant designed to help people with memory problems remember their events and activities. The implementation of an event manager, free time manger, medication remainder and a sensory system, to manage and monitor the user, we aim to improve their quality of life and increase their independence.

An interpretable guideline model to handle incomplete information

Healthcare institutions are both natural and emotionalstressful environments; indeed, the healthcare professionals may fall intopractices that may lead to medical errors, undesirable variations in clinical doing and defensive medicine. On the other hand, Clinical Guidelines may offer an effective response to these irregularities in clinical practice, if the issues concerning their availability during the clinical process are solved. Hence, in this work it is proposed a model intended to provide a formal representation of Computer-Interpretable Guidelines, in terms of the extensions of the predicates that make their universe of discourse, as well as a Decision Support System framework to handle Incomplete Information. It will be used an extension to the language of Logic Programming, where an assessment of the Quality-of-Information of the extensions of the predicates referred to above is paramount.

Using Non-invasive Wearables for Detecting Emotions with Intelligent Agents

This paper proposes the use of intelligent wristbands for the automatic detection of emotional states in order to develop an application which allows to extract, analyze, represent and manage the social emotion of a group of entities. Nowadays, the detection of the joined emotion of an heterogeneous group of people is still an open issue. Most of the existing approaches are centered in the emotion detection and management of a single entity. Concretely, the application tries to detect how music can influence in a positive or negative way over individuals’ emotional states. The main goal of the proposed system is to play music that encourages the increase of happiness of the overall patrons.

Find It – An Assistant Home Agent

Cognitive impaired population face with innumerable problems in their daily life. Surprisingly, they are not provided with any help to perform those tasks for which they have difficulties. As a consequence, it is necessary to develop systems that allow those people to live independently and autonomously. Living in a technological era, people could take advantage of the available technology, being provided with some solutions to their needs. This paper presents a platform that assists users with remembering where their possessions are. Mainly, an object recognition process together with an intelligent scheduling applications are integrated in an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environment.

iGenda: an event scheduler for common users and centralised systems.

The world is walking towards an aged society as a consequence of the increasing rate of longevity in modern cultures.With age comes the fact that memory decreases its efficiency and memory loss starts to surge.Within this context, iGenda is a Personal Memory Assistant (PMA) designed to run on a personal computer or mobile device that tries to help final-users in keeping track of their daily activities. In addition, iGenda has included a Centralised Management System (CMS) on the side of an hospital-like institution, the CMS stands a level above the PMA and the goal is to manage the medical staff (e.g. physicians and nurses) daily work schedule taking into account the patients and resources, communicating directly with the PMA of the patient. This paper presents the platform concept, the overall architecture of the system and the key features on the different agents and components.