Green Care Achievement Based on Aquaponics Combined with Human–Computer Interaction

Abstract

According to the “World Population Prospects 2022” released by the United Nations in August 2022, the world will officially enter an “aging society”. In order to provide the elderly with an improved quality of daily life, “health promotion” and “prevention of disease” will be important. With respect to care of the elderly, the concepts of “therapeutic environment” and “green care” have been explored and developed. Therefore, in this study, we combine the currently popular Internet of Things (IoT) into an aquaponics system and proposes a smart green care system (SGCS). The proposed system uses face recognition technology to record the labor and rehabilitation history of the elderly, in combination with environmental data analysis, to enable automatic control decisions for equipment in conjunction with a voice control system to reduce the obstacles faced by the elderly in operating the information system. It also uses image recognition technology to monitor and notify about plant diseases and insect pests to achieve automatic management and enhance the interaction between the elderly and the SGCS through human–computer interaction. The SGCS allows the elderly to guide it to participate in appropriate activities through direct contact with the natural environment, thereby enhancing the quality of green healing life. In this study, taking long-term care institutions as an example, we verified proof of concept (PoC), proof of service (PoS), and proof of business (PoB), confirming the feasibility of the SGCS. The SGCS proposed in this study can be successfully used in long-term care institutions and various other environments, such as medical units and home care contexts. It can take full advantage of the functions associated with the concept of “healing environment” and “green care” widely recognized by users. Therefore, it can be widely used in the field of long-term care in the future.