Elderly patients with dementia present a massive care challenge for family members and care professionals. In the last year of a patient's life, half of family caregivers report spending 46 or more hours a week assisting him/her with activities of daily living (ADL). More than half felt they were """"""""on duty"""""""" 24 hours a day, and half had to end/reduce employment due to the demands of care-giving. Ingenium proposes to create a practical, self-learning, system for activity monitoring and support of elderly persons. This advanced activity monitoring combined with Ingenium's interactive communications and support system will extend independent living and the successful conduct of everyday tasks for the elderly, disabled, and soldiers with PTSD and TBI. The goal in this proposal is to produce a system that can reliably recognize activities using only one Ingenium wireless room-master per room and an Ingenium wearable wireless badge linked to an AI system with self-learning capability. This is accomplished through the interactive badge and room masters. In contrast, existing technology uses many sensors and requires off-line processing to train the activity recognizer and is not useable beyond laboratory environments. Additionally, no current commercial system has interactive planning and scheduling support. Ingenium will utilize the assistance of the AI lab staff at Washington State University which is an acknowledged leader in recognizing activities of daily living.
Aim #1 will re-create the WSU technology, transfer activity knowledge to the Ingenium platform and enhance the platform with interactive self learning Aim #2 will outfit the WSU smart apartment with the Ingenium system. The smart apartment has a complex set of 37 sensors. The Ingenium system will both simplify and enhance the WSU configuration by utilizing only 7 Ingenium room-masters. Twenty students will participate in a study to verify that the Ingenium system provides superior activity location and recognition than the current wired multiple motion sensor system.
Aim #3 will test the ability of the enhanced interactive prompting and learning capability of the Ingenium system to learn the same activities without the knowledge transfer hence validating a real time learning activity recognizer is possible in a commercializable system. One of goals of Ingenium's business plan is to commercialize this system. .
Today, 60 million Americans - one in five - require assistance in their living arrangements and daily activities. These are primarily elderly individuals and persons with disabilities. By applying the latest monitoring and artificial intelligence technologies, the outcomes of this research would enable the Ingenium system to improve the quality of home and institutional health care, and at the same time, reduce the cost of providing that care. The marketplace for technology to assist the elderly will grow sharply from $2 billion today to more than $20 billion by 2020, according to new reports from Frost &Sullivan and Forester Research (Liz Boehm, Principal Analyst for Healthcare and Life Sciences) entitled """"""""Healthcare Unbound's Early Self-Pay Market"""""""".
