Sylvain Giroux

A KEYHOLE PLAN RECOGNITION MODEL FOR ALZHEIMER'S PATIENTS: FIRST RESULTS

This article addresses the problem of recognizing the behavior of a person suffering from Alzheimers disease at early-intermediate stages. We present a keyhole plan recognition model, based on lattice theory and action description logic, which transforms the recognition problem into a classification issue. This approach allows us to formalize the plausible incoherent intentions of the patient, resulting from the symptoms of his cognitive impairment, such as disorientation, memory lapse, etc. An implementation of this model was tested in our smart home laboratory, by simulating a set of real case scenarios.

The Intelligent Habitat And Everyday Life Activity Support

Dementia causes cognitive deficits producing functional impairments. Continuous care and monitoring are thus compulsory to keep at home elders suffering from dementia. Intelligent habitat can play a central role toward a global and integrated solution and alleviate relatives from the care burden. The general idea is twofold. On the one hand, the physical environment could supplement elder cognitive impairments by providing personalized environmental cues that assist him in achieving his tasks. On the other hand, the intelligent house could maintain a link with relatives and medical care system to inform them of the evolution of the disease and to alert them in case of emergency. This paper shows how intelligent houses can deliver such cognitive assistance to elders, prolonging the time they can remain at home. First we derive the requirements for cognitive assistance by an intelligent habitat from the impact of the Alzheimer disease in the daily living of elders. Subsequently we describe the layered computer infrastructure needed to implement a distributed intelligent house information system. The implementation of such a pervasive system raises many issues that are not trivial from a computer science perspective. In this paper, we focus on modelling issues. Finally a simple scenario is used to exemplify the interactions between the intelligent house and the elders.

Towards useful services for elderly and people with disabilities

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, ICOST 2011, held in Montreal, Canada, in June 2011. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 16 short papers and 8 student papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on smart home and village; health telematics and healthcare technology; wellbeing, ageing friendly and enabling technology; and medical health telematics and healthcare technology.

A Hybrid Plan Recognition Model for Alzheimer's Patients: Interleaved-Erroneous Dilemma

In the context of an intelligent habitat assisting an occupant with Alzheimers disease, the goal of plan recognition is to predict the patients behavior in order to identify the various ways of supporting him in carrying out his daily activities. However, this situation raises the following dilemma: the observation of a new action, different from the expected one, cannot be directly interpreted as an error; this action can instead constitute the beginning of a second plan, carried out in an interleaved way. In addition, this same action is not inevitably the result of a multiple plan realization; it can effectively be an error. To resolve this dilemma, we propose in this paper a hybrid recognition model based on probabilistic description logic. An implementation of this model was tested in a real smart home infrastructure, by simulating a set of real case scenarios.

A Smart Home Agent for Plan Recognition of Cognitively-impaired Patients.

Assistance to people suffering from cognitive deficiencies in a smart home raises complex issues. Plan recognition is one of them. We propose a formal framework for the recognition process based on lattice theory and action description logic. The framework minimizes the uncertainty about the prediction of the observed agent’s behaviour by dynamically generating new implicit extra-plans. This approach offers an effective solution to actual plan recognition problem in a smart home, in order to provide assistance to persons suffering from cognitive deficits. An implementation of this model was incorporated in our smart home laboratory, in order to validate the approach. We currently planning the experimentation phase of the system, which will be based on a set of real case scenarios.

Pervasive behavior tracking for cognitive assistance

The current and prospective situation of cognitively impaired people entails great human, social, and economical costs. Smart homes can help to maintain in place cognitively impaired people, to improve their autonomy, and accordingly to alleviate the burden put on informal and professional caregivers. The research performed at DOMUS lab aims at turning the whole home into a cognitive prosthetic, especially by providing cognitive assistance. In this process, behavior tracking is a fundamental piece. After sketching the infrastructure, two cognitive assistants are used to illustrate how activity recognition can help to address four kinds of cognitive deficits (initiation, attention, planning, and memory). An experimentation of one of these asistant involving people with intellectual deficiencies is finally shortly described.

A Possibilistic Approach for Activity Recognition in Smart Homes for Cognitive Assistance to Alzheimer’s Patients

Providing cognitive assistance to Alzheimer’s patients in smart homes is a field of research that receives a lot of attention lately. The recognition of the patient’s behavior when he carries out some activities in a smart home is primordial in order to give adequate assistance at the opportune moment. To address this challenging issue, we present a formal activity recognition framework based on possibility theory and description logics. We present initial results from an implementation of this recognition approach in a smart home laboratory.

The Role Of Intelligent Habitats In Upholding Elders In Residence

The intelligent habitat is made of fixed components (movements detectors and intelligent electric household appliances) and small mobile processors worn by the elder. Fixed and mobile components communicate to assist the elder in performing his tasks and to intervene in case of risk. The system has two types of features: those carried out inside the residence (information acquisition, cognitive help like sound or visual cues when everyday life activity is carried out in an incomplete or dangerous way) and those reporting to the relatives and the external care network major risk events or evolution of the elder health state. The system intervention with the elder must be personalized according to the incurred risk gravity, his health state, his life habits and his preferred interaction mode: image, text, sound, voice ...

Electronic organiser and Alzheimer's disease: Fact or fiction?

Alzheimers disease is a degenerative disease characterised by a progressive loss of cognitive functions and impairment of activities of daily living severe enough to interfere with normal functioning. To help persons with this disease perform a variety of activities, our research team developed AP@LZ, an electronic organiser specifically designed for them. Two participants with Alzheimers disease learned how to use AP@LZ in their daily lives by following a structured learning method. After the learning phase, the participants were able to use AP@LZ efficiently and facilitate their day-to-day activities for several months, despite the steady progression of the disease. These results suggest that persons with Alzheimers disease can learn to use new technologies to compensate for their everyday memory problems, which opens up new rehabilitation possibilities in dementia care.

Managing and Deployment of Applications with OSGi in the Context of Smart Home

The presence of a multitude of heterogeneous devices in a smart home environment create a whole puzzle when comes the time to deploy, update, or manage applications on these devices. The configuration and the updating of applications in that context can be expensive, as well as resource and time consuming, especially when there are several similar environments to implement. This paper considers those problems, brings a glimpse on possible solutions, and proposes the use of the OSGi framework to ease the deployment and the management of applications. Moreover this paper presents a summary of a distributed system currently in last phase of development that will resolve the proposed problematic. This system allows the remote managing and deployment in the context of a distributed and pervasive environment for cognitively impaired people.