Secure IoT Assistant-Based System for Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

The increasing number of people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a significant concern in many countries. Hence, new solutions for preventing, detecting and supporting persons with AD are required. The aim of this paper is to develop a prototype that provides psychological support services and ensures secure sending of information that can be investigated by a family member to protect the person with AD. The designed wearable prototype is able to classify the detected images into two categories including family/non family member based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Moreover, our prototype enables tracking the location of the person with AD. Furthermore, our IoT prototype protects the images captured by the webcam through the steganography technique that allows the recipient to decode the original image using a key. Another feature of the developed prototype concerns the possibility of communication via voice messages between the person with AD and his/her member. Additionally, our prototype integrates Google assistant for supporting the persons with AD and therefore answering his/her questions, reducing social isolation and predicting his/her psychological status. So far, our prototype tracks the location of the person with AD and sends an alert if the person leaves a specified area. Our prototype is useful for persons who are affected by mild and moderate AD. It supports them for remembering their family members and recognizing other people after decrypting the extra information hidden in the images. Our results show that our prototype is effective for detecting the images of the family members of a person with AD while ensuring a high accuracy and precision compared to other benchmark techniques.