A happiness-oriented home care system for elderly daily living

Abstract

Currently the modern developing home-care systems highlight the functionalities on bio-signals measurement, security surveillance and health care, however most of them work independently. In this paper, a newly warming-care framework for elderly is proposed, not only to reach the aforementioned services, but also including following kindly services, that is, the remote monitoring, the web camera management, the emergency call for help, the behavior recognition and feedback, and the remote control entertainment services, to reach a comprehensive humanistic-caring system. The proposed framework is motivated by the individual alphabet on “HAPPINESS” which are redefined and interpreted as “Health”, “Ability”, “Protection”, “Personalization”, “Interaction”, “Nursing”, “Entertainment”, “Succor” and “Smile”. Three main services are spotlighted to achieve the goals described below. The Web-based Central Camera Management Service (WCCMS) is a real-time remote monitoring function that a caregiver can pay attention to care elderly anytime and anywhere through web services; the Multimodal Human-Machine Interaction Service (MHMIS) provides the audio-visual cognitive functions to interact with elderly, and the Web-based User Management Service (WUMS) gives user a smart HMI interface including bio-signal measurement, help button, remote control, and hospital appointment scheduling functionalities. To evaluate the proposed framework usability, MOS (Mean Opinion Score) is applied and average MOS 4.2 score is acquired that reveals the proposed system expectable.