AmICare: Ambient Intelligent and Assistive System for Caregivers Support

Recent and continuous technological advances in sensors, wireless communications and computing regarding price, size and power consumption have allowed the seamless integration of sensors into everyday objects in our homes and offices making non-intrusive user monitoring a reality. Intelligent processing of sensor data can be used to extract valuable information for carers so that they can provide better assistance to people such as elderly or disabled. These systems are commonly referred to as AAL (Ambient Assisted Living). In this paper we present an example of this approach called "Ambient Intelligence for Caregivers" or AmICare for short. Nodes of a WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) are integrated into furniture for non-intrusively monitoring of users' behaviour, whereas a software layer with an HMI (Human Machine Interface), that runs in a central node and server, can be configured with certain rules in a per resident basis to generate alerts to caregivers. AmICare is especially useful where there is need to supervise a high number of people (nursing homes, elderly or disabled people residences). A complete set of experimental tests has been carried out at a residence for intellectually disabled which requires massively distributed sensor nodes around all residence's bedrooms. This deployment in this scenario, the system architecture and its HMI are described in the paper. Finally, the testing procedure with the main significant results and caregivers' point of view are detailed.