Context-aware Environments for Independent Living

The range of pervasive computing technology available for use in healthcare continues to evolve, allowing for an increasing variety of wireless sensors, devices, and actuators to be cost effectively deployed in smart, context-aware environments. One area that is of compelling interest for the application of this technology is independent living of the elderly. An independent living environment needs to support an individual’s healthcare needs and activities of daily living (ADL), while extending social interaction, environment control, and information flow to care giver and family communities. This must be done without compromising an individual’s medical care, safety, privacy, or security and should allow an individual to maintain maximal independence. Continuing variations in cognitive and physical capability must also be considered. Current context-aware pervasive computing environments only partially address these requirements. This paper surveys current pervasive computing research activities in this area and introduces research on an architecture for a pervasive computing infrastructure to realise independent living environments. The infrastructure will allow contextsensitive adaptive interfaces to assist individuals with tasks and provide alternate modes of interaction with common devices such as phones, microwaves, and televisions. It also considers the community policies that define what access rights, degree of control, and interactions, caregivers, friends, and family have with the environment in normal and extraordinary situations. These policies will influence the context-aware behaviour of the independent living environment and can be used to shape interface adaptation, trigger social or care specific interactions, guide daily tasks, and support health-care or other sophisticated independent-living applications. * The work reported in this paper has been funded in part by the Co-operative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC) through the Australian Federal Government's CRC Programme (Department of Education, Science and Training).