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Electronics
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Ambient Assisted Living Technologies
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Ambient Assisted Living Technologies

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 16393

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. António Manuel De Jesus Pereira

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Guest Editor
Computer Science Department, School of Technology and Management, Computer Science and Communications Research Centre, Polytechnic of Leiria, Campus 2, Morro do Lena-Alto do Vieiro, Apartado 4163, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Interests: Internet of Things; SMART IoT Ecosystems; Internet of Unmanned Vehicles; Industry 4.0; next-generation networks and services and ambient assisted living
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Nuno Alexandre Ribeiro Costa

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Computer Science Department, School of Technology and Management, Computer Science and Communications Research Centre, Polytechnic of Leiria, Campus 2, Morro do Lena – Alto do Vieiro, Apartado 4163, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Interests: smart spaces; smart objects; WSN; systems integration; embedded systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

An aging population is a global phenomenon that comes from longer life expectancy and a reduction of births. An aging population puts substantial pressure on both society (families and communities) and healthcare service providers.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a research area which has emerged from Ambient Intelligence (AmI) concept as an option to deal with the challenges associated with the aging population, mainly by trying to aid and assist people with specific demands (e.g., elderly, chronic conditions, and people with disabilities) to live longer and independently in their natural environment. AAL relies on sensors, actuators, smart devices, wireless networks, artificial intelligence algorithms, sophisticated e-services, and applications to monitor and assist individuals in daily life where context information (location, activity recognition, etc.), safety, learning, privacy, and usability play an important role. However, such complex and multidisciplinary systems still present issues and challenges that must be overcome in order to achieve an effective and transparent way to aid and care for elderly people. For instance, multi-user environments or the presence of pets could present an additional layer of complexity. Intrusion devices such as cameras, even with image capturing feature turned off (relying only on embedded sensors) could dramatically change the user behavior and peace of mind leading to acceptance challenges. Another important challenge is how to ensure the privacy of individual data and information.

In this Special Issue, we will cover the enabling technologies related to ambient assisted living. We invite researchers who are working on AAL, ranging from hardware and firmware to network technologies and network-enabled devices, but not limited to, to submit their high-quality manuscript for publication in this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. António Manuel de Jesus Pereira
Prof. Dr. Nuno Alexandre Ribeiro Costa
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • e-Health sensors and/or actuators
  • e-Health IT components
  • Wearables, body sensor networks, smart portable devices
  • Mobile assisted living
  • Elderly patient monitoring
  • Activity recognition systems and algorithms
  • Human–computer interactions and interfaces
  • Context-aware systems and algorithms
  • Wireless body sensors and body sensor networks
  • In-home wireless sensor networks
  • Software-defined network (SDN)
  • Embedded systems architectures
  • Routing and control protocols
  • Localization technologies and techniques
  • Machine to machine communication
  • 5g-enabled devices and services

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

18 pages, 40694 KiB  
Article
Usability of Smartbands by the Elderly Population in the Context of Ambient Assisted Living Applications
by Luís Correia, Daniel Fuentes, José Ribeiro, Nuno Costa, Arsénio Reis, Carlos Rabadão, João Barroso and António Pereira
Electronics 2021, 10(14), 1617; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10141617 - 06 Jul 2021
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3088
Abstract
Nowadays, the Portuguese population is aging at a fast pace. The situation is more severe in the interior regions of the country, where the rural areas have few people and have been constantly losing population; these are mostly elderly who, in some cases, [...] Read more.
Nowadays, the Portuguese population is aging at a fast pace. The situation is more severe in the interior regions of the country, where the rural areas have few people and have been constantly losing population; these are mostly elderly who, in some cases, live socially isolated. They are also often deprived of some types of social, health and technological services. One of the current challenges with respect to the elderly is that of improving the quality of life for those who still have some autonomy and live in their own residences so that they may continue living autonomously, while receiving the assistance of some exterior monitoring and supporting services. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm demonstrates great potential for creating technological solutions in this area as it aims to seamlessly integrate information technology with the daily lives of people. In this context, it is necessary to develop services that monitor the activity and health of the elderly in real time and alert caregivers or other family members in the case of an unusual event or behaviour. It is crucial that the technological system is able to collect data in a nonintrusive manner and without requiring much interaction with the elderly. Smartband devices are very good candidates for this purpose and, therefore, this work proposes assessing the level of acceptance of the usage of a smartbands by senior users in their daily activities. By using the definition of an architecture and the development of a prototype, it was possible to test the level of acceptance of smartbands by a sample of the elderly population—with surprising results from both the elderly and the caregivers—which constitutes an important contribution to the research field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The evaluation showed that most users did not feel that the smartband was intrusive to their daily tasks and even considered using it in the future, while caregivers considered that the platform was very intuitive. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ambient Assisted Living Technologies)
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31 pages, 6424 KiB  
Article
CogniViTra, a Digital Solution to Support Dual-Task Rehabilitation Training
by João Quintas, Joana Pais, Ana Isabel Martins, Hugo Santos, Lúcia Neves, Sérgio Sousa, David Benhsain, Frédéric Dierick, Antonio Callén, António Cunha, Nelson Pacheco Rocha and Vítor Tedim Cruz
Electronics 2021, 10(11), 1304; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10111304 - 30 May 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3043
Abstract
This article focuses on an eHealth application, CogniViTra, to support cognitive and physical training (i.e., dual-task training), which can be done at home with supervision of a health care provider. CogniViTra was designed and implemented to take advantage of an existing Platform of [...] Read more.
This article focuses on an eHealth application, CogniViTra, to support cognitive and physical training (i.e., dual-task training), which can be done at home with supervision of a health care provider. CogniViTra was designed and implemented to take advantage of an existing Platform of Services supporting a Cognitive Health Ecosystem and comprises several components, including the CogniViTra Box (i.e., the patient terminal equipment), the Virtual Coach to provide assistance, the Game Presentation for the rehabilitation exercises, and the Pose and Gesture Recognition to quantify responses during dual-task training. In terms of validation, a functional prototype was exposed in a highly specialized event related to healthy and active ageing, and key stakeholders were invited to test it and share their insights. Fifty-seven specialists in information-technology-based applications to support healthy and active ageing were involved and the results and indicated that the functional prototype presents good performance in recognizing poses and gestures such as moving the trunk to the left or to the right, and that most of the participants would use or suggest the utilization of CogniViTra. In general, participants considered that CogniViTra is a useful tool and may represent an added value for remote dual-task training. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ambient Assisted Living Technologies)
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23 pages, 3240 KiB  
Article
Voice Assistant Application for Avoiding Sedentarism in Elderly People Based on IoT Technologies
by Adrián Valera Román, Denis Pato Martínez, Álvaro Lozano Murciego, Diego M. Jiménez-Bravo and Juan F. de Paz
Electronics 2021, 10(8), 980; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10080980 - 20 Apr 2021
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 6784
Abstract
The rise in the use of virtual assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa among different sectors of society is facilitating access to information and services that were previously inconceivable due to the existing digital divide due to age. This situation allows [...] Read more.
The rise in the use of virtual assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa among different sectors of society is facilitating access to information and services that were previously inconceivable due to the existing digital divide due to age. This situation allows especially the elderly to perform tasks much more easily and to access applications and services that could be a challenge for them with other digital user interfaces. With this in mind, the EMERITI project aims to improve the lives of the elderly through the use of virtual assistants in different case studies. In this sense, virtual voice assistants along with the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can contribute to avoid sedentarism in the elderly; however, it is necessary to address the problem of proactivity presented by the virtual assistants available in the market. This article presents a solution that, through the use of activity monitoring smart bracelets, IoT devices and virtual voice assistants allow the elderly to monitor their daily physical activity simply by using their voice and therefore prevent them from sedentary patterns. Finally, this study presents the technical results obtained after the deployment of the proposed system and discusses the main advantages and the current challenges of the use of virtual assistants in applications to prevent sedentary lifestyles in the elderly. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ambient Assisted Living Technologies)
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23 pages, 2557 KiB  
Article
SmartWalk BAN: Using Body Area Networks to Encourage Older Adults to Perform Physical Activity
by David Bastos, José Ribeiro, Fernando Silva, Mário Rodrigues, Anabela G. Silva, Alexandra Queirós, Antonio Fernández-Caballero, Nelson Pacheco Rocha and António Pereira
Electronics 2021, 10(1), 56; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10010056 - 31 Dec 2020
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2357
Abstract
Due to the demographic ageing of the world’s population and the respective consequences, it is necessary to guarantee that older adults can be active and maintain their independence and autonomy for longer. The aim of the SmartWalk system is to promote walks in [...] Read more.
Due to the demographic ageing of the world’s population and the respective consequences, it is necessary to guarantee that older adults can be active and maintain their independence and autonomy for longer. The aim of the SmartWalk system is to promote walks in the city in order to stimulate physically active lifestyles. Body area networks are used to aggregate data collected by different type of sensors, which are transmitted to a server to support informed decisions of caregivers when planning physical activities for their care receivers. This article presents the SmartWalk system and reports an experimental setup that was developed to assess the performance of the current implementation and the respective critical components. According to the results, the SmartWalk system presents good performance in terms of battery usage, data upload, capacity to recover from connectivity failures and wireless coverage of its body area network. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ambient Assisted Living Technologies)
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