A virtual caregiver for assisted daily living of pre-frail users

Abstract

As Europe sees its population aging dramatically, Assisted Daily Living for the elderly becomes a more and more important and relevant research topic. The Movecare Project focuses on this topic by integrating a robotic platform, an IoT system, and an activity center to provide assistance, suggestions of activities and transparent monitoring to users at home. In this paper, we describe the Virtual Caregiver, a software component of the Movecare platform, that is responsible for analyzing the data from the various modules and generating suggestions tailored to the user’s state and needs. A preliminary study has been carried on over 2 months with 15 users. This study suggests that the presence of the Virtual Caregiver encourages people to use the Movecare platform more consistently, which in turn could result in better monitoring and prevention of cognitive and physical decline.