An integrated approach to the well-being of the elderly people at home

Abstract

The paper presents the outline and the preliminary developments of NINFA (iNtelligent Integrated Network For Aged people), a project for the well-being of the elderly people at home. This architecture is based on a service platform suited for elder people called the Virtual Village Network, whose user interface allows to deliver different services at home, namely: user supervision, communication and interaction among users for social inclusion, exergame delivering, monitoring of the wellness status. After the discussion of some results of the investigation on the acceptability issues of the ICT technologies related to the project, the User Interface (UI) and the novel Human Computer Interface (HCI) have been developed. The HCI is particularly suited for elderly people and motor impaired patients because the interaction is managed only by finger/hand gestures and by vocal control through simple commands. A set of preliminary exergames developed for the user training and monitoring are presented. During the exergame execution, the user interface allows the real-time acquisition of a set of motor, linguistic and cognitive parameters related to the user performance. The analysis of the verbal production of each subject is used to observe its language evolution and to detect the onset of any cognitive deficit. The relationship between some parameters and the neurological/wellness status of the user is discussed.