Service personalization for assistive living in a mobile ambient healthcare-networked environment

Abstract

For more than a decade, it has been observed that due to the continuously increasing elderly population, medical expenditures for home health-care have rapidly increased every year. Health-care organizations are being encouraged to find more efficient methods of providing high-quality care with cost savings. Elderly people who live alone may fear being unable to obtain help if they are injured or ill. For many families, the fear of such an event can dominate decisions about living arrangements. During the last decades, this fear has generated an industry, marketing house automations, alarm-and-notification systems as well as assistive technologies and interventions that aim at easier and more efficient control of their living environment, as well as the provision of specialized home-care services. In this study, the most important aspects of the INHOME platform architecture, the home-care services provided together with the home-care applications developed such as health monitoring and household appliances monitoring and control, are discussed. The goal of the INHOME project is to provide ambient assistive living services to improve the quality of life of elderly people at home and is mainly targeted at ameliorating the ways of providing intelligent services for assisting independent living of elderly people at home.