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Aspects of Ambient Assisted Living and Its Applications
Numerous such applications have been developed to significantly improve the quality of
life. Some of them are listed below.
• Smart homes that can monitor the home environment and human behavior
• Tracking the health of an individual by monitoring blood pressure, ECG, oxygen
intake, weight, and food intake
• Emergency response with GPRS to locate loved ones
• Pain-care system that can electronically locate pain and accurately report its
intensity to the physician
• Enabling people to sleep well by playing soothing music, with the option of
changing the sound track by merely shaking the phone
• Sensors can also record the sleeping frequency and report abnormalities, if any
• Increasing the memory of the elderly and detecting disorders like Alzheimers
• Rehabilitation for specially abled people
• One touch solution in clinical care, nursing, health care, home care, and other
services that is required for daily activities
Most of the applications concentrate on activity recognition, mobility of the person, and
monitoring of changes in their environment. The functions of these applications also
include tracking health records and medications, locating new friends, enhancing mental
sharpness, and providing soothing music for users to sleep.
8.3 Sensors and Devices for AAL
It is long since IoT started its journey, and the objective of AAL is to apply technology
and communication to assist the elderly to lead an independent and well-connected life.
A wide range of sensors are available for this purpose like those monitoring a person’s
activity, reading environment conditions, assessing a person’s behavior response, and
ensuring their health care. Sensors are connected to a network, and wireless communications exchange the data recorded between heterogeneous nodes. Sensors’ reliability, miniaturization, power economy, network capability, and cognitive computing have moved
the research of AAL and their usage to be part of our daily life.
Some of the basic categories of the sensors are wearable, dense, and sparse sensors.
Wearable sensors are integrated with some devices or other materials that we wear the
whole day. These sensor signals are in contact with our body to recognize the human characteristics like temperature and activities like walking, sleeping, falling, and also other
movements. The difficultly here will be the viability of such devices and the adaptability
of people to such devices. However, the dense sensors can be placed externally at different
places in the house to capture any movement and to monitor the environmental changes at
the residence. The sensors used for this purpose include RFID, accelerometers, and those
that enable acoustic and motion capturing. Sparse sensors are placed at particular places at
home. It is used for behavioral recognition using probabilistic or fuzzy analysis.
Figure 8.1 indicates that the sensors could respond at different intervals for monitoring
activity on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, or minute basis. There are also indicators that
Aspects of Ambient Assisted Living and Its Applications
Numerous such applications have been developed to significantly improve the quality of
life. Some of them are listed below.
• Smart homes that can monitor the home environment and human behavior
• Tracking the health of an individual by monitoring blood pressure, ECG, oxygen
intake, weight, and food intake
• Emergency response with GPRS to locate loved ones
• Pain-care system that can electronically locate pain and accurately report its
intensity to the physician
• Enabling people to sleep well by playing soothing music, with the option of
changing the sound track by merely shaking the phone
• Sensors can also record the sleeping frequency and report abnormalities, if any
• Increasing the memory of the elderly and detecting disorders like Alzheimers
• Rehabilitation for specially abled people
• One touch solution in clinical care, nursing, health care, home care, and other
services that is required for daily activities
Most of the applications concentrate on activity recognition, mobility of the person, and
monitoring of changes in their environment. The functions of these applications also
include tracking health records and medications, locating new friends, enhancing mental
sharpness, and providing soothing music for users to sleep.
8.3 Sensors and Devices for AAL
It is long since IoT started its journey, and the objective of AAL is to apply technology
and communication to assist the elderly to lead an independent and well-connected life.
A wide range of sensors are available for this purpose like those monitoring a person’s
activity, reading environment conditions, assessing a person’s behavior response, and
ensuring their health care. Sensors are connected to a network, and wireless communications exchange the data recorded between heterogeneous nodes. Sensors’ reliability, miniaturization, power economy, network capability, and cognitive computing have moved
the research of AAL and their usage to be part of our daily life.
Some of the basic categories of the sensors are wearable, dense, and sparse sensors.
Wearable sensors are integrated with some devices or other materials that we wear the
whole day. These sensor signals are in contact with our body to recognize the human characteristics like temperature and activities like walking, sleeping, falling, and also other
movements. The difficultly here will be the viability of such devices and the adaptability
of people to such devices. However, the dense sensors can be placed externally at different
places in the house to capture any movement and to monitor the environmental changes at
the residence. The sensors used for this purpose include RFID, accelerometers, and those
that enable acoustic and motion capturing. Sparse sensors are placed at particular places at
home. It is used for behavioral recognition using probabilistic or fuzzy analysis.
Figure 8.1 indicates that the sensors could respond at different intervals for monitoring
activity on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, or minute basis. There are also indicators that