Arnaud Vergnol

Multimodal notification framework for elderly and professional in a smart nursing home

This article presents a multimodal notification framework allowing the optimal delivery and handling of multimedia requests and medical alerts in a nursing home. Multimodal notifications are automatically adapted to different criteria such as the device characteristics, capabilities and modalities, the emergency of the situation, the semantics of the notification, the recipient, etc. This framework is operated with various applications (e.g., health alert, medicine reminder, activity proposition) that have been supported by user requirement analysis done nearby an elderly population and healthcare professionals (e.g., nurses, caregivers). An acceptability study was performed to understand the users’ expectations regarding this new technology and modalities. This study was followed by the evaluation of proposed services with different real end-users in a pilot site. Results of these studies presented in this paper highlight the added value of the proposed framework to enhance the quality of life of elderly people as well as the efficiency of the medical staff.