Dementia Ambient Care: Multi-Sensing Monitoring for Intelligent Remote Management and Decision Support

The increase in average lifespan across the world has been accompanied by an unprecedented upsurge in the occurrence of dementia with high socio-economic costs. The development of personal health systems provides a means of dealing with such problems in a meaningful and sustainable manner, enabling persons with dementia to maintain independence and inclusion in society, while improving their quality of life and the effectiveness of their caregivers. Multi-parametric monitoring of daily activities, lifestyle, behaviour, in combination with medical data, provides clinicians a comprehensive image of the person's condition and its progression, without their being physically present, allowing remote care of their condition. The objective of Dem@Care is the development of a complete system providing personal health services to people with dementia, as well as medical professionals and caregivers, by using a multitude of sensors, for context-aware, multi-parametric monitoring of lifestyle, ambient environment, and health parameters. Multi-sensor data analysis, combined with intelligent decision making mechanisms, will allow an accurate representation of the person's current status and will provide the appropriate feedback, both to the person and the associated caregivers, enhancing the standard clinical workflow. Many research challenges will arise, ranging from data collection and analysis to integration, interpretation and feedback. Aggregation of information from complementary sources will be a critical aspect of multi-sensor processing that will be addressed, along with the advance of knowledge and data management methodologies, for scalable and meaningful interpretation of the person's condition. The data will be analysed and interpreted in conjunction with established or newly created medical knowledge, for the production of shared patient-doctor decision support systems. Appropriate user-friendly interfaces will be developed, facilitating the rapid incorporation of the proposed system in the users' lives.