Abstract
Population ageing, together with the desire to maintain an autonomous lifestyle, poses today’s societies with a challenge that technological advances can help considerably to cope with. The widespread use of smartphones and their increasing computing power and storage capacity make them the ideal tool to achieve this goal. In this paper, we present Digital Avatars, a software framework adapted to the needs of older adults who wish to preserve their lifestyle, but who require assistance through technology. Building on previous work on the People as a Service model, Digital Avatars takes advantage of a smartphone’s capabilities and services to collect information about the people who own them. To do this, it applies Complex Event Processing techniques extended with uncertainty to infer the habits, preferences, and needs of the device owner to build with them an enhanced virtual profile of the user. These virtual profiles are the mechanism for monitoring the quality of life of older adults: analyzing their patterns of activity, reminding them of medication schedules, or detecting risky situations that generate alerts to relatives, caregivers, or the community health system.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organization [1], from 2000 to 2016, life expectancy has increased by 5 years (72.5 to 77.5) in Europe and by 5.5 years (66.5 to 72.0) globally
We present a motivating example for illustrating our proposal (Section 2), and we give an extensive description of the framework (Section 3), presenting its architecture, the digital avatar profiles, how we obtain and treat the necessary data, and how data uncertainty is addressed in our proposal
We adopt a collaborative model with a peer-to-peer architecture built on smartphones, as opposed to the more common client-server architecture. This way, Digital Avatars becomes a tool where the users are able to decide with which other avatars or third parties to share their data and which external data they want to incorporate into their own avatar
Summary
According to the World Health Organization [1], from 2000 to 2016, life expectancy has increased by 5 years (72.5 to 77.5) in Europe and by 5.5 years (66.5 to 72.0) globally. Gerontechnology [2] is a multidisciplinary field that brings together gerontology and technology to create technological environments for an inclusive, innovative, and independent life of older adults, improving their social participation. It focuses on the adaptation of technological environments to the health, housing, mobility, communication, leisure, and work of older people [3]
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