PerCHI: Pervasive Human Computer Interface for the Elderly

Currently, for the elderly living on their own at home, loneliness and health caring are often serious problems for both developing and developed countries. Although there are already some emerging technologies providing functional application, such as the systems to do Assist Living, Fall Detection, Activity Recognition, Event Reminder, even Game Design for the elderly, there is currently a lack of innovative designs which adopt latest technologies to fulfill the elderly residents’ higher level socio-emotional needs such as companionship and socialization. In this talk, we propose a series of designs that offers full care and enriches their interactions for the elderly from three aspects. 1) Human-Human Interaction. High quality telepresence system with efficient bandwidth consideration is implemented for communicating with the families face by face. The systems contribute to shorten the distance between the elderly and their families and reduce the isolated feelings.2) Human-Machine Interaction. Several systems equipped with visible and invisible sensors are developed to detect the activities of the elderly. The systems are dedicated to enable the elderly to take rational physical exercise every day and perform unobtrusive persuasive actions. 3) Human-Things Interaction. Pervasive devices such as mobile phones are adopted to explore the desired information in the environment, such as WiFi based locating and navigating. The systems featured by EAI (Embedded Artificial Intelligence) will employ novel technologies in the field of Internet of Things to enhance the feeling of the elderly while interacting with the surroundings.

In conclusion, novel technologies and systems based on pervasive sensors had been emerged and developed for the elder generation, in order to reduce down the isolated feeling, to facilitate the living activity and to keep the health of the elderly in the approaching aging era.

-> Download presentation