Doubt Removal for Dependant People from Tablet Computer Usage Monitoring

Abstract

This article describes an agent which detects and handle potentially abnormal situations from the monitoring of applications usage on a tablet computer. The main purpose of this agent is to improve dependent people's safety by signaling potentially risky situations to caregivers. Indeed, such signaling can improve response time, thus reducing the consequences of such situations. The detection of abnormal situations is based on the construction of a user profile from the monitoring of used applications. When a user is inactive during a certain period of time, the recent activity is compared to the learned user's profile to decide if this is normal or not. Once an abnormal situation has been identified, the system will try to confirm that the situation is actually abnormal by prompting the user for input. In order to be as less intrusive as possible, the input request is an application suggestion. The suggested application will be the one that is usually the most used during the time period corresponding to the inactivity. When a situation is confirmed as abnormal, the tablet agent will send an intervention request to the user's caregivers. A simple coordination mechanism aimed at reducing redundant interventions and improving caregivers response time is proposed. The main contribution of this work is to propose a mechanism which monitors elderly people's applications usage on a tablet computer and is therefore able to complement existing monitoring devices in the detection of abnormal situations. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.