System and low cost device for health in smart homes: monitoring the physical and emotional aspects of users

Abstract

The number of people with disabilities, reduced mobility and the elderly is increasing in several countries, with emphasis on the USA, Japan and Brazil. More and more this part of the population tries to live alone in search of its independence. However, they often have greater difficulties in their daily lives and are more susceptible to diseases than the rest of the population. Thus, for the purpose of better quality of life and/or recovery of treatments, they are often treated at home after surgery or after discharge from the hospital. This often leads to the use of technology to monitor their daily lives and/or while they recover at home.The use of the technology in this context is feasible, especially in countries where the number of people in these conditions is high, being able to provide systems that can monitor them and issue alerts to the medical staff and/or relatives whenever necessary. Therefore, the use of technologies that make it possible to monitor people's health becomes extremely relevant. In this sense, the concept of Health in Smart Homes (HSH) emerges from the combination of Telemedicine, Internet of Things (IoT) and Information Systems; it is defined as a smart home, equipped with specialized devices for distance healthcare, including smartphones, embedded and wearable technologies (eg smartwatch). Such devices can take action whenever a critical situation is detected. This context has been widely explored in several studies in the literature, where the authors propose technological solutions to help caregivers in the monitoring of people with needs. The goal is to provide people with some difficulty or illnesses a tool that can help their lives in a less dependent way.One of the great challenges for researchers is to find ways to provide systems that can intelligently recognize, interpret and react in a user-sensitive way to meet the requirements of as many individuals as possible. One of the ways is to develop flexible adaptive systems at runtime, offering each user a system that fits according to their preferences, needs and intentions of use.In this sense, our work proposal has the hypothesis that the use of the multi-sensor approach (eg camera, accelerometer, movement, among others) allows the analysis of the physical and emotional state of individuals in a non-intrusive and modular way flexible. The proposed solution differs from all systems described in the state of the art and allows new resources for people's quality of life. Furthermore, the proposed approach will investigate the identification of daily patterns, recognition of emotions and strategies of intelligent learning of activities and situations, so that it can provide feedback on the physical and emotional state of the user. (AU)