Smart Homes And Health Telematics Designing A Better Future Urban Assisted Living

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, ICOST 2018, held in Singapore, Singapore, in July 2018. The theme of this year volume is "Designing a better Future: Urban Assisted Living", focusing on quality of life of dependent people not only in their homes, but also in outdoor living environment to improve mobility and social interaction in the city. The 21 regular papers and 11 short papers included in this volume focus on research in the design, development, deployment and evaluation of smart urban environments, assistive technologies, chronic disease management, coaching and health telematics systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, ICOST 2014, held in Denver, CO, USA in June 2014. The 21 revised full papers presented together with three keynote papers and 9 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Design and Usability, assistive and sentient environments, cognitive technology, activity recognition, context and situation awareness, Health IT and short contributions.

Nowadays networks, microprocessors, memory chips, smart sensors and actuators are faster, cheaper and smaller than ever. They are becoming available anywhere, anytime. Current advances in such enabling technologies let foresee novel applications and services for improving the life of elderly and disabled people in their home and outside. These conference proceedings present the latest approaches and technical solutions in the area of smart homes, health telematics, and enabling technologies. The first chapter delves into the user perspective to ascertain real needs and design truly useful services. The following chapter explores the enabling technology. Distributed sensors, smart devices and networks appear as the nuts and bolts compulsory to build up smart homes. Chapter three looks at the realization of smart homes. Pervasive computing is emerging as one of the key approaches to organize computations within smart homes. The fourth chapter addresses the issue of using smart home features to design and deliver smart care services to persons with disabilities and elderly people. Finally Chapter five outlines standardization efforts and practical and industrial experiences. ICOST aims at creating an active research community dedicated to explore how smart homes in particular and health telematics in general can foster independent living and an enhanced life style for elderly and disabled people. On the one hand, smart homes are augmented environments with embedded computers, information appliances and multi-modal sensors allowing people to perform tasks efficiently by offering unprecedented levels of access to information and assistance from computer. On the other hand, health telematics makes the most of networks and telecommunications to propose health services, expertise and information at distance.

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Digital Health Transformation and Smart Ageing, ICOST 2023, held in Wonju, South Korea, during July 7–8, 2023. The 18 full papers and 16 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: IoT and AI Solutions for E-health, Biomedical and Health Informatics, Wellbeing Technologies, Short Contributions: Medical Systems and E-health Solutions and Short Contributions: Wellbeing Technologies.

With the advancement in processing power and storage now enabling algorithms to expand their capabilities beyond their initial narrow applications, technology is becoming increasingly powerful. This highly topical Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on work, assessing its impact on an array of economic sectors, their resulting nature of work, and the subsequent policy implications of these changes.

This book looks at how AgeTech can support the autonomy and independence of people as they grow older. The authors challenge readers to reflect on the concepts of autonomy and independence not as absolutes but as experiences situated within older adults’ social connections and environments. Eleven personas of people around the world provide the context for readers to consider the influence of culture and values on how we understand autonomy and independence and the potential role of technology-based supports. The global pandemic provides a backdrop for the unprecedentedly rapid adoption of AgeTech, such as information and communication technologies or mobile applications that benefit older adults. Each persona in the book demonstrates the opportunity for AgeTech to facilitate autonomy and independence in supporting one’s identity, decision making, advance care planning, self care, health management, economic and social participation, enjoyment and self fulfillment and mobility in the community. The book features AgeTech from around the world to provide examples of commercially available products as well as research and development within the field. Despite the promise of AgeTech, the book highlights the “digital divide,” where some older people experience inadequate access to technology due to their geographic location, socio-economic status, and age. This book is accessible and relevant to everyday readers. Older adults will recognize themselves or peers in the personas and may glean insight from the solutions. Care partners and service providers will identify with the challenges of the personas. AgeTech entrepreneurs, especially “seniorpreneurs,” will appreciate that their endeavours represent a growing trend. Researchers will be reminded that the most important research questions are those that will enhance the quality of life of older adults and their sense of autonomy and independence, or relational autonomy and interdependence.

We often conceptualize that older adults retire into a life of carefree luxury among palm trees, golf courses, and pristine beaches. Unfortunately, reality differs today – many retire in place, and often it is the case they retire in rural areas far from hospitals and care-giving centers. For instance, over half of the older population in the state of Minnesota lives in small towns away from the center of care, which is Minneapolis/St. Paul. This year, ICOST 2008 aimed at focusing on this important reality and on gerontechnology––the use of technology to enhance the quality of life of older adults in rural lands. We had a strong technical program this year spanning many critical topics incl- ing: remote monitoring and tele-care, access control and privacy preservation, und- standing user requirements and needs, autonomic learning and reasoning about user behavior, activities and contexts, user interface design, middleware for sensing and actuation in smart homes, cognitive assistants, context-aware service provisioning, among other topics. We received a total of 54 submissions of papers, abstracts and posters, from 14 diff- ent countries. Through a blind review process, we accepted 24 full papers, 9 abstracts, and 7 posters. Each submission received two or three reviews with the exception of a few that received four reviews. We are thankful to all the reviewers who helped in the review process including members of the Technical Committee and the additional reviewers that we needed to compensate for unreturned reviews.