Final published version
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter
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TY - CHAP
T1 - Assistive Environments for Individuals with Special Needs
AU - Helal, Sumi
AU - Lee, C.
AU - Mann, W.C.
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - As we age, we experience normal declines in vision, hearing, cognition, and movement. We also accumulate chronic conditions such as arthritis, heart and circulatory disorders, glaucoma, and tinnitus. Quality of life and independence are impacted by disabilities, and our health and caregiver systems will be increasingly stressed as the numbers increase. Hence, there is a significant need today to innovate cost-effective ways to help elders maintain their independence, and at the same time, reduce caregiver burden. The impressive wireless and portable technologies we have today and the emerging mobile computing paradigm offer a unique and real opportunity for us to innovate pervasive applications and environments designed to support the elderly. Such environments will enable cost-effective self-care and will maintain a higher quality of life and independence for our oldest population. In this chapter, we define assistive environments for the elderly, and we follow a scenario-based approach to illustrate the benefits of these environments to the elders. We then present a specific assistive environment, which we prototyped, and which we call the University of Florida Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) Smart House. We present our reference middleware architecture and several applications that we built in that experimental house. Finally, we review research on smart environments for elders with disabilities, and elder health care applications and practices. © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
AB - As we age, we experience normal declines in vision, hearing, cognition, and movement. We also accumulate chronic conditions such as arthritis, heart and circulatory disorders, glaucoma, and tinnitus. Quality of life and independence are impacted by disabilities, and our health and caregiver systems will be increasingly stressed as the numbers increase. Hence, there is a significant need today to innovate cost-effective ways to help elders maintain their independence, and at the same time, reduce caregiver burden. The impressive wireless and portable technologies we have today and the emerging mobile computing paradigm offer a unique and real opportunity for us to innovate pervasive applications and environments designed to support the elderly. Such environments will enable cost-effective self-care and will maintain a higher quality of life and independence for our oldest population. In this chapter, we define assistive environments for the elderly, and we follow a scenario-based approach to illustrate the benefits of these environments to the elders. We then present a specific assistive environment, which we prototyped, and which we call the University of Florida Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) Smart House. We present our reference middleware architecture and several applications that we built in that experimental house. Finally, we review research on smart environments for elders with disabilities, and elder health care applications and practices. © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
KW - Assistive environments
KW - Augmented awareness system
KW - General reminder system
KW - Mobile patient care-giving assistant
KW - Remote monitoring
KW - RERC smart house
KW - Smart environments for the elderly
KW - SmartWave
U2 - 10.1002/047168659X.ch16
DO - 10.1002/047168659X.ch16
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9780471686590
SN - 9780471544487
SP - 361
EP - 383
BT - Smart Environments
A2 - Cook, Diane
A2 - Das, Sajal Kumar
PB - Wiley
ER -