Dem@Home: ambient intelligence for clinical support of people living with dementia

Abstract

With the ever-growing prevalence of dementia, nursing costs are in-creasing, while the ability to live independently vanishes. Dem@Home is an ambient assisted living framework to support independent living while receiv-ing intelligent clinical care. Dem@Home integrates a variety of ambient and wearable sensors together with sophisticated, interdisciplinary methods of im-age and semantic analysis. Semantic Web technologies, such as OWL 2, are ex-tensively employed to represent sensor observations and application domain specifics as well as to implement hybrid activity recognition and problem detec-tion. Complete with tailored user interfaces, clinicians are provided with accu-rate monitoring of multiple life aspects, such as physical activity, sleep, com-plex daily tasks and clinical problems, leading to adaptive non-pharmaceutical interventions. The method has been already validated for both recognition per-formance and improvement on a clinical level, in four home pilots.