Pervasive intelligence system to enable safety and assistance in kitchen for home-alone elderly

Abstract

With growing aging population, elderly with physical or cognitive impairments may end up staying alone at home. Kitchen is generally the most vulnerable place at home as mishandling of devices or improper kitchen activities could lead to hazardous and life threatening situations. In this paper, we have proposed pervasive intelligence system that augment existing kitchen environment with sensors, actuators and processing intelligence. We have first identified possible safety issues and, then deploy sensors to recognize what happened and actuators to control kitchen settings. We have developed 3-stage processing with hierarchical inference approach to determine abnormalities in the kitchen. According to the severity of abnormalities, the proper appliances control or reminder escalation to appropriate personal will be issued to alleviate or minimize the undesirable consequences. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.