Virtual Caregiver: An Ambient-Aware Elderly Monitoring System

TLDR

The increasing elderly population and their cognitive and physical impairments create a growing demand for human caregivers, highlighting a shortage of traditional care resources. The study introduces the Virtual Caregiver (ViCare) framework to enable human caregivers to continuously monitor elderly individuals by being aware of their surroundings. ViCare uses environmental sensors to infer activities and contexts, then dynamically determines appropriate services or caregiver interventions based on activity type. Experiments in an instrumented home showed that ViCare reduces caregiver cognitive load, enhances elderly well‑being, and achieved high satisfaction, effective event handling, caregiver acceptance, and engagement.

Abstract

The growing number of elderly population at home and abroad necessitates improved approaches to elderly care provision. Elders, often with cognitive and physical impairment, need assistance in their activities of daily living (ADLs), which is usually provided by human caregivers (HCGs). As the demand for caregiver's assistance increases, the shortage of traditional care resources becomes obvious. In this paper, we present the Virtual Caregiver (ViCare) framework that supports a HCG to monitor continuously the elderly by being aware of their surroundings. The ViCare system attempts to understand the elderly persons' activities and contexts based on the data captured by the sensors placed in their environment and dynamically decides what services to provide them or whether there is a need to interrupt HCG depending on the type of activities. It not only minimizes the cognitive load of the HCG but also provides a seamless assistance to the elderly toward their improved health and well-being in their living environment. We conducted the experiments in an instrumented home environment and obtained positive results in terms of the satisfaction of the elderly, interaction event handling, caregiver's acceptance, and their engagement.