The intelligent habitat and everyday life activity support

Dementia causes cognitive deficits producing functional impairments. Continuous care and monitoring are thus compulsory to keep at home elders suffering from dementia. Intelligent habitat can play a central role toward a global and integrated solution and alleviate relatives from the care burden. The general idea is twofold. On the one hand, the physical environment could supplement elder cognitive impairments by providing personalized environmental cues that assist him in achieving his tasks. On the other hand, the intelligent house could maintain a link with relatives and medical care system to inform them of the evolution of the disease and to alert them in case of emergency. This paper shows how intelligent houses can deliver such cognitive assistance to elders, prolonging the time they can remain at home. First we derive the requirements for cognitive assistance by an intelligent habitat from the impact of the Alzheimer disease in the daily living of elders. Subsequently we describe the layered computer infrastructure needed to implement a distributed intelligent house information system. The implementation of such a pervasive system raises many issues that are not trivial from a computer science perspective. In this paper, we focus on modelling issues. Finally a simple scenario is used to exemplify the interactions between the intelligent house and the elders.