Research Article
LaCasa: Location And Context-Aware Safety Assistant
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2012.248642, author={Jesse Hoey and Xiao Yang and Eduardo Quintana and Jesus Favela}, title={LaCasa: Location And Context-Aware Safety Assistant}, proceedings={6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare}, publisher={IEEE}, proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH}, year={2012}, month={7}, keywords={mobile dementia pomdp assistance wandering}, doi={10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2012.248642} }- Jesse Hoey
Xiao Yang
Eduardo Quintana
Jesus Favela
Year: 2012
LaCasa: Location And Context-Aware Safety Assistant
PERVASIVEHEALTH
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2012.248642
Abstract
Wandering is a common behavior among people with dementia (PwD). It is also one of the main concerns of caregivers since it can cause the person to get lost and injured. The frequency and manner in which a person wanders is highly influenced by the person's background and contextual factors specific to the situation. In this paper we investigate some of the properties of wandering behaviours, particularly related to our ability to sense them with mobile devices. We then propose a novel decision-theoretic model that estimates the risk faced by the PwD and decides on the appropriate action to take, such as prompting the PwD or calling the caregiver. The model can be tailored to the user needs (e.g. known locations, level of cognitive decline) and takes into account uncertainty, and contextual information gathered from sensors, such as current location, noise, and proximity to the caregiver. A preliminary version of the system has been instantiated in a wandering assistance application for mobile devices running on an Android platform.