Autonomous systems to support social activity of elderly people a prospective approach to a system design

Abstract

The reduction in physical and social activity in elderly people degrades the aging process, causing or increasing suffering to the individual and to his family and friends. Most times, the individual well-being is related to the strength of the social bonds with the family and friends group, so it is important to keep this bonds in the various stages of life, especially in the later life, when the individual has health limitations and is living in a community centre. This paper proposes an exploratory approach, regarding the use of information technologies systems, as autonomous systems, to assist in supporting and encouraging elderly people to preserve and develop their social activities and the relationships with their family and friends social group. During the course of the aging process, some aging people have their social activity degraded due to health limitations and institutionalization in elderly care centers, in which they are admitted as residents. We propose the design of a software system, capable of running in autonomous devices, such as, robots and other consumer appliances, enabling them to recognize and interact with the users, according to their state of mind and the specific current moment context. The interactions should be simple and focused on keeping the users informed about the current life events of their family and friends, and create the opportunities for the users to interact with the participants of those events by creating interaction proposals. The systems would monitor the user's family and friends group, regarding their information and actions on the social media. The system's interactions with the user would be based on that knowledge and on the knowledge of the user's current context. An adaptive user interface would present and manage the user interactions, acting as a mediator between the user and his family and friends group.

The Ethics of Digital Well-Being: A Thematic Review

“…For example, the European Commission (2018) recently stated that digital technologies are necessary to address challenges such as a growing and ageing population, health workforce shortages, and the rising burden of preventable non-communicable diseases. Many of the articles in our review echo similar points, with a significant number of contributions focusing on how assistive technologies could support the independence of elderly individuals in their own home and support the challenges of residents in care homes (Asghar et al 2015;Bennett et al 2017;Bryant et al 2017;Dasgupta et al 2016;Devillier 2017;Mahoney et al 2007;Margot-Cattin and Nygård 2009;Misselhorn et al 2013;Mulvenna et al 2013;Palm 2013;Reis et al 2016;Sharkey and Sharkey 2012;Silva et al 2015).…”

A prospective design of a social assistive electronic system for the elderly

“…This paper is an extension of a work originally presented in the 2017 International Conference on Technology and Innovation on Sports, Health and Wellbeing [1].…”

Using Intelligent Personal Assistants to Strengthen the Elderlies’ Social Bonds

“…In our previous work [6], it was proposed a model for the design of an autonomous system, based on the paradigm of the intelligent personal assistant, in order to support the elderly people in maintain their social bonds with the family, friends and colleagues groups. This proposal is focused on tailoring the digital assistant for the specific group of elderlies and for their specific life contexts, which has good perspectives, as the intelligent personal assistants are equipment's that are becoming more interactive and with a more natural language [7].…”

“…The model, previously proposed [6], has two main tasks: (1) User identification and data acquisition related to user´s personal information, context environment and state of mind assessment; (2) Proposal of a specific interaction activity, accordingly to the user's emotional state and context. In the first task, the system will identify the user and assess his state of mind using image analysis.…”