Exploiting Smart Systems for Monitoring and Assisting Elderly People at Home

In a super-aging society, the government is changing the policy from conventional facility care to in-home care, where elderly people live in their homes as long as possible. A major challenge is that in-home care relies heavily on the self-aid of individual elders as well as the assistance of family caregivers. Our research group has been studying service-oriented smart systems that support elderly people at home. In this chapter, we introduce two kinds of technologies for monitoring in-home elderly people. The first technology is non-intrusive environmental sensing, which monitors the daily living of elderly people. Using the time-series environmental data, automated activity recognition is also conducted. The second technology is called mind sensing (called “kokoro” sensing), which monitors the internal states of elderly people. An animated virtual agent and a text-based chatbot actively talk to elderly people to externalize their internal states as words, and then record the words in order to monitor the minds that cannot be captured by conventional sensors.