Leader: Stefano Ricciardi (UNIMOL); Other collaborator(s): Davide Donato Russo, Pasquale Trinchese (UNIMOL)
The goal of this task is to devise a platform for continuous, ubiquitous, and implicit outdoor monitoring of older people through edge (smartphones, smartwatches) and cloud computing integrated with context data based on territorial assets exploiting Geographical Information Systems. This cross-disciplinary approach to the design of innovative care systems will enable a continuous analysis of the behavior of older people (e.g., movement and habits) and their vital parameters (health signals) by means of wearable and/or portable devices to identify potential states of distress and correlate them to the ongoing activity and the environmental context. According to this paradigm, the stress level of an older person can be monitored during her/his walks to identify areas of the city where pedestrian traffic or architectural barriers are not adequate for older people (the greater the stress the greater the discomfort in crossing that area).
The activity carried out in the first quarter of 2024 involved the high-level design of the framework to be used for the ubiquitous monitoring of informal (but possibly also institutional) caregivers and the older people, in order to acquire a time series of data useful for representing the interaction between caregivers and older people, the trajectories travelled during the activities of requesting and providing care and the proximity to sites relevant to this process through georeferencing, as well as the physiological conditions of the individuals involved during the interval of observation. The work started with the definition of the acquisition functionalities and their operational parameters necessary to support the monitoring model in the application context of interest. The design carried out at this level had as a transversal requirement a substantial independence from the characteristics of the devices used and an adaptability of the sampling to different operational contexts. The result of this activity will allow, through a review round to be carried out with all the actors involved in the research, to arrive at the definition of the detailed specifications to be used for the executive design of the components of the monitoring framework
The activity carried out involved the high-level design of the platform to be used for the ubiquitous monitoring of informal caregivers continued in order to acquire a time series of data useful for representing the interaction between caregivers and older people, the trajectories travelled during the activities of requesting and providing care and the proximity to sites relevant to this process through georeferencing, as well as the physiological conditions of the individuals involved during the interval of observation.
The definition of the acquisition functionalities and their operational parameters necessary to support the monitoring model in the application context of interest has been continue in order to carry out a transversal requirement a substantial independence from the characteristics of the devices used and an adaptability of the sampling to different operational contexts. The result of this activity allowed, to define the detailed specifications for the design of the main sw components of the monitoring framework.
Based on previous design specifications, the implementation of the informal caregivers monitoring system architecture has begun. The monitoring platform is organized through four distinct levels, Data Acquisition, Data Storage, Visual Interface and Real-time Monitoring, each one playing a crucial role to ensure efficiency, scalability and security. This layered structure also allows for modular and flexible management, facilitating the integration of new components and the adaptation to different use cases. Since the platform is device-agnostic, it can be further extended to manage new devices so that both sets of measurable raw parameters and derivable parameters are potentially expandable.