How communication technology can help, support the elderly and leverage healthy aging and independent living.
Elderly care is an indicator of how humane our society is. According to today’s needs and demands, technology is a crucial contributor in integrated care for the elderly. Delivering technology support for friendly, nonintrusive, and effective senior care is a challenging task. A personalized, contextualized and social signal-aware communication between seniors and smart systems is an effective response to this challenge.
One of the challenges faced is long-term measurement of the impact of smart technologies on elderly people. In response to this challenge, we developed domain-specific metrics of healthy aging and independent living in collaboration with the Anton Trstenjak Institute of Gerontology and Interpersonal Relations. These metrics will allow us to quantitatively estimate healthy aging and independent living by applying a machine learning model to real world behaviour data of an elderly individual.
The next challenge is effective, user-friendly communication of this technical support to elderly people. In this regard, we are developing a personalized and contextualized recommender system for daily activities. The aim is to optimize these recommendations not according to standard computer science metrics such as precision and recall but according to the healthy aging metrics (see previous section).