An ambient assisted living nighttime wandering system for elderly

Abstract

The Assistive living technologies provide good results for the support of specific activities transforming a home into a smart home. In this paper, we present a personalized ambient support system for elderly suffering from Alzheimer's dementia and nighttime wandering. Our goal is to help the person stay at home as long as possible and regain a regular circadian cycle while providing more comfort to the caregiver. The intervention proceeds in two phases. During the monitoring phase, the system determines the resident profile based on nighttime routines. Data is gathered from sensors dispatched in the smart home, coupled with physiological data obtained from worn sensors. Data is then classified to determine engine rules that will provide assistance to the resident to satisfy his needs. In the second phase, assistance is provided to the person by triggering rules depending on the activities occurring during night. It offers a calm environment with music and visual icons to soothe the person then encourage it to return to bed. The system is installed at the Alzheimer's home using wireless technologies. Multiple heterogeneous technologies are put in common to achieve it. Reliabilities and robustness tests were carried out in a 4 1/2 room apartment for 3 months with over 3.78 million collected data tuples. These tests have established three clusters of activities necessary for the recognition of nighttime wandering activities. This helped start an ongoing experiment in homes.