A Mobile System for Assisted Living with Ambient Facial Interfaces

Abstract

This paper describes a mobile Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solution designed to meet the require-ments of modern health services in caring for, monitoring and motivating the elderly in their own envi-ronment. Our solution goes beyond the function of classical telemonitoring by delivering integrated functionality that includes health management, mental monitoring, mood assessment as well as physical and relaxation exercises. In addition, we provide communication and delivery services in location-based manner using built in GPS, WiFi and 3G mobile connectivity (MediCAST). Bluetooth compatible blood pressure and body weight measurement devices are complemented with a body-mounted wireless physiological sensor to monitor activity, body temperature and stress. Telemetric data is continuously recorded on a local host computer while simultaneously being also sent to a central database, where a rule-based system or monitoring health personnel may make emergency assessment. To further help the elderly, to monitor their own drug intake or dietary goals we introduce a novel feedback and display methodology, called Ambient Facial Interfaces (AFI) that employ animated photo-realistic faces to show them in an easy-to-understand form their compliance levels. Finally, we describe a prototype of our fu-turistic AAL platform using home robots to help people with daily activities.