Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health

Abstract

Active life style promotes healthy aging. Cooking, particularly, is an important activity of daily living for elderly people. However, cooking is accompanied with several risks for this population category due to the aging related decline. Assistive technology is a promising solution to assist elderly people and enhance their safety. We introduce in this paper a context-aware cooking-safe environment, an innovative assistive technology to enhance safety of elderly people while cooking. We mainly focus in this paper on the hardware architecture of our system. The context is gathered via sensors deployed in kitchen environment. The system is composed of sensor nodes, microcontroller, and a computing unit. We also introduce in this paper a solution for sensors positioning and system integration in a real-world cooking environment. Furthermore, we present the results of sensors testing in real-world configurations.