Monitoring elderly people with the ROBOCARE domestic environment: Interaction synthesis and user evaluation

Abstract

This article describes aspects of a fully implemented artificial intelligence (AI) system that integrates multiple intelligent components to actively assist an elderly person at home. Specifically, we describe how constraint-based scheduling technology is used to actively monitor a pattern of activities executed by the person and how detected temporal constraint violations are used to trigger meaningful and contextualized proactive interactions. This article also presents a psychological evaluation of the system focusing on elderly people's attitudes, in which system acceptability, perceived utility, interaction modality, and emotional response are considered. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.