Virtual assistants for the elderly

• Main Author: Goh, Jestin
• Other Authors: Tan Ah Hwee
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/76937
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The rapid ageing population has always been a concern in Singapore over the years. The Singapore government have introduced various policies in coping with the ageing population issues. Although the various financial schemes provided by the government play an essential part in the ageing population, but there is a greater need in professional healthcare to provide meticulous healthcare for the elderly. In addition, the government have worked towards the smart nation by initiating various senior academy programs in providing series of IT related courses for the elderly. This initiative allows the elderly to experience and integrate into the community and enhances the quality of life. This project aims to develop a system to encourage elderly to age in place through healthy living with the use of the IT technology such as sensors, and intelligent agents in providing meticulous all-round tender care to the elderly in their own home. The system consists of four components which are the virtual environment, the knowledge-based situation awareness model (SAM), the smart agents and the web portal. The virtual environment replicates the environment of an elderly living alone in her own home where sensors are installed to collected sensory data. The SAM is a knowledge-based that stores the sensory data collected from the virtual environment. The smart agents consist of the Smart Butler and Virtual Nurse that resides on different platform that can provide responsive feedback and recommendation to the elderly using the sensory data stored in SAM. The web Portal is a web-based support hub that cares for the wellness of the elderly based on the physical, cognitive, emotional and social aspect. The main functions completed in this project includes the integration the monitoring of the daily actives of the elderly in an unobtrusive manner using the sensory data collected and intelligent agents to provide responsive communication with elderly. When an abnormity is detected, priority-based services will be delivered by the agents autonomously where the agent will notify the family member and care-giver by posting onto the timeline in the eHealthPortal. Besides monitoring the activity of the elderly, the agent can encourage healthy living to the elderly by recommending suitable courses and events with the use of web-crawler. The web-crawler crawls for relevant courses and events from the source websites that are mainly caters to the elderly users. Furthermore, after the elderly expresses her interest in the recommended courses or events. The agent can register the courses and events on behalf for the elderly by adding them into her personalized calendar. As such, the overall project aims to create awareness and benefiting the elderly who are aging in their own home by using the IT technology.