Health Monitoring and Assistance to Support Aging in Place

To many people, home is a sanctuary. For those people who need special medical care, they may need to be pulled out of their home to meet their medical needs. As the population ages, the percentage of people in this group is increasing and the effects are expensive as well as unsatisfying. We hypothesize that many people with disabilities can lead independent lives in their own homes with the aid of at-home automated assistance and health monitoring. In order to accomplish this, robust methods must be developed to collect relevant data and process it dynamically and adaptively to detect and/or predict threatening long-term trends or immediate crises. The main objective of this paper is to investigate techniques for using agent-based smart home technologies to provide this at-home health monitoring and assistance. To this end, we have developed novel inhabitant modeling and automation algorithms that provide remote health monitoring for caregivers. Specifically, we address the following technological challenges: 1) identifying lifestyle trends, 2) detecting anomalies in current data, and 3) designing a reminder assistance system. Our solution approaches are being tested in simulation and with volunteers at the UTA's MavHome site, an agent-based smart home project.