INESC Porto invests in Ambient Assisted Living
European senior citizens are more autonomous thanks to technologies designed by INESC Porto
04th February 2011
The Information and Computer Graphics Systems (USIG) at INESC Porto LA is one of the partners in the European project Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment - Market Validation (CAALYX-MV), led by the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica. CAALYX-MV is the third in a line of projects by INESC Porto in Ambient Assisted Living. The first project was CAALYX (Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment) and this was followed by eCAALYX (Enhanced Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment). These projects work towards improving the quality of life of senior citizens in a sustainable way, allowing them to become more autonomous and secure.
More independent and more autonomous senior citizens
The main objective of this project is to increase the time that senior citizens can safely reside in their home, increasing their autonomy and their independence. The CAALYX-MV system will monitor the state of health and the social wellbeing of the users, providing the tools and the services necessary for their daily activities and focusing on parameters such as levels of comfort, security, energy efficiency and communication.
As the name suggests CAALYX-Market Validation will perform market validation through various pilot schemes. During these pilot schemes the spending on health services and social services of at least 40 users will be monitored over a period of three months. This analysis will help lay down the foundations for the development of a system that will encourage the use of telemonitoring systems and reduce visits to clinics, health centres or doctors’ surgeries. CAALYX-MV’s aim is to reach a level of 85% acceptance of the system.
The satisfaction of the users, along with the number of face-to-face visits and the improvement of quality of life in relation to security at home, are the main criteria being measured. The CAALYX-MV project covers monitoring at home and mobility (including geopositioning and fall detection). This means that emergency situations can be detected in real time and the entities responsible for the care of the senior citizen or the emergency services can be notified.
The success story continues
CAALYX-MV follows two other projects, also involving USIG, in the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL): CAALYX, which developed a light-weight device that when worn can measure the person’s vital signs, detect falls and automatically raises an alert to their care centre in case of an emergency. The device uses three systems: mobile monitoring, domestic monitoring and monitoring and care centres. According to Ângelo Martins, one of the project managers at INESC Porto, the AAL line of research came from USIC (now USIG) during brainstorming organised by the previous unit managers António Gaspar (still the unit manager) and João José Pinto Ferreira, in an attempt to extend the areas covered by the unit. “Artur Rocha (Technical Manager of CAALYX) and I had complimentary ideas and this was how project CAALYX was born”, states the researcher. The project began in 2007 and was completed in March 2009 with great success, above all because it was able to answer many of the needs of the senior citizen population.
Following Project CAALYX came eCAALYX. eCAALXY focuses on the development of a system to monitor outpatients with multiple chronic illnesses (comorbidity) and it is a step up from CAALYX. The project includes new and more modern functions with clear, non-intrusive remote monitoring systems that can guarantee an even higher level of autonomy for senior citizens.
Project CAALX-MV follows the same lines as the previous projects and will compliment them. As well as helping to develop the mobility monitoring system based on the smartphone Android, INESC Porto will also be responsible for the management of the field tests. The project aims to offer a service that brings together all of the parties involved, for example, the senior citizens, their families, their doctors and their care workers in order to guarantee a complete level of autonomy and confidence. According to Ângelo Martins, what makes this project stand out is the fact that it “offers a complete scalable monitoring service (it supports thousand of senior citizens) and it brings together all of the stakeholders: the senior citizens, the family, the doctors and the care workers”.
Strong progress in Health
This project is part of a multinational community incentive involving both INESC Porto and Telefónica along with other partners such as the textile research centre Cetemmsa (CET - Spain), the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC – Spain), the Fundación Hospital Comarcal Sant Antoni Abat (ABAT - Spain), the Cooperativa Sociale Coos Marche Onlus Societa Cooperativa Per Azioni (COOSS - Italy), the Associação Fraunhofer Portugal Research (AICOS), the Corsciente GmbH & Co. KG (CORS – Germany) and the Stichting Smart Homes (SmH - Netherlands). CAALYX-MV has a budget of 955 thousand Euros and the project will run for three years.
As well as Ângelo Martins and Artur Rocha who have already been mentioned, the USIG/INESC Porto team is made up of various collaborators including Carlos Tavares and Mário Ricardo Henriques. In accordance with the project manager, despite INESC Porto having a long history of working with information systems linked to health care, “the innovation for this project could bring us even closer to the end user”. Ângelo Martins considers the AAL area to be fundamental in the long term, “It is a vast market that is critical for the survival of our society and we need to be actively involved”, claims the researcher. Furthermore, “we need to be conscious that the security and autonomy of senior citizens is a problem that covers broad areas and CAALYX aims to reach just one specific sector of the market”.
António Gaspar, who runs USIG with Fernando Silva, knows that there is room in the Unit for many projects in this wide area, highlighting as examples the AAL4ALL, the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) Project Mobilizador with 5 million Euros of funding, the anchor project for Health Cluster Portugal in which INESC Porto will lead five subprojects, or ICT4Depression within the framework of the Seventh Framework Programme (2007 to 2013).
It is important to note that the involvement of INESC Porto in the development of innovative solutions, linked to Health, is not limited to the Information and Computer Graphics Systems Unit. The institution has in fact developed projects in the areas of Telecommunications and Optoelectronics, for example evaluating the aesthetic results of breast cancer conservative treatment using digital images or applying optical fibre sensors in Biomedicine. Furthermore, INESC Porto has been involved in the incubation of companies linked to Health such as Tomorrow Options, which is revolutionising the prevention of diabetic foot disorders by creating the world’s first portable medical device, WalkinSense.
Source: BIP January 2011