Integrating Wearable Computing in Ambient Assisted Living Environments

Abstract: Wearable Computing technology in Ambient Assisted Living environments provides the benefit of autonomy. Especially for people with chronic diseases like COPD (lunger) or CKD (kidney) wearable computing allows people with the integration into an Ambient Assisted Living environment to stay longer at home and reduce the time to spend in hospital. However, not only the monitoring of the health status can be supported by technology. Especially for people with Parkinson disease wearable technology can support the medication of people in an ambient way.

Wearable Computing is designed to abolish the distinction between information acquisition and primary tasks in the real world. Wearable computing enables the replacement of explicit by implicit information input by context information coming from sensors. The information presentation has to be redesigned, too. Thus human computer interaction becomes much more intuitive and the desktop paradigm is replaced partially e.g. by using speech, gesture or just sensors giving high-level feed-back like a signal light or an action of a tangible device.

Enablers are beside the wearable technology on the user side also software frameworks and platforms to share information on users and devices. In application prototypes experiences are available for the above mentioned chronic diseases.

The presentation gives examples of ongoing public funded research projects like HELP-AAL, CHRONIOUS, IT-ASSIST and LSW.

The design of user interfaces is especially for people with moderate age related impairments con­cerning vision, sight and dexterity a special challenge. Instead of designing systems for specific impairments interfaces that can be used independent of a personal impairment should be created. Only user studies can give the designers the necessary feed-back to ensure the required user acceptance: this can be achieved with the concept of living labs.

However, the development of products which are accessible to the largest possible group of users can be regarded as one of the major challenges for manufacturers of consumer products. It is therefore crucial that the product development process is supported by methods and tools having the potential to include essential human factors in early phases of the development process. As ergonomics evaluation and user testing with real users are not only complex, but can be very time and cost-intensive, an alternative approach is using virtual user models (VUM).

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