Most expert projections indicate that in 2030, there will be over one billion people aged 60 or over. The vast majority of them prefer to spend their last years at home, and almost a third of them live alone. This creates a growing need for technology-based solutions capable of helping older people to live independently in their places. Despite the wealth of solutions proposed for this general problem, there are very few support systems that can be reproduced on a larger scale. In this study, we propose a method to monitor the activity of the elderly living alone and detect deviations from the previous activity patterns based on the idea that the residential living environment can be modeled as a collection of behaviorally significant places located arbitrarily in a generic space. Then we use virtual pheromones—a concept defined in our previous work—to create images of the pheromone distribution maps, which describe the spatiotemporal evolution of the interactions between the user and the environment. We propose a method to detect deviations from the activity routines based on a simple statistical analysis of the resulting images. By applying this method on two public activity recognition datasets, we found that the system is capable of detecting both singular deviations and slow-deviating trends from the previous activity routine of the monitored persons.

Nowadays globalized society and knowledge-based economy need people with creative thinking in all areas (engineering, medicine, art, entrepreneurship, and education). Thus, current studies are turning their attention to find new ways to stimulate creativity over individual or groups. In the present research, we hypothesized that the creativity can be enhanced if it is used social interaction abilities for knowledge sharing and collaboration. We present a collaborative application that provides users with an environment where they can share ideas and they can collaborate to choose those ideas that are most suitable for the intended use. This application provides to users a shared, web-based platform to enhance creativity. In this platform, users are gathered in a Social Group in which they can share ideas, comments, documents and links around. This application is part of a physical environment which provides users a number of tools to stimulate their creativity. If problems arise in the creative process, then the application provides facilities for a coordinator who can use different methods to unlock brainstorming progression.

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