A Lifestyle Monitoring System for Older Adults Living Independently Using Low-Resolution Smart Meter Data.

BACKGROUND: Monitoring the lifestyles of older adults helps promote independent living and ensure their well-being. The common technologies for home monitoring include wearables, ambient sensors, and smart household meters. While wearables can be intrusive, ambient sensors require extra installation, and smart meters are becoming integral to smart city infrastructure. Research Gap: The previous studies primarily utilized high-resolution smart meter data by applying Non-Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring (NIALM) techniques, leading to significant privacy concerns. Meanwhile, some Japanese power companies have successfully employed low-resolution data to monitor lifestyle patterns discreetly. SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY: This study develops a lifestyle monitoring system for older adults using low-resolution smart meter data, mapping electricity consumption to appliance usage. The power consumption data are collected at 15-min intervals, and the background power threshold distinguishes between the active and inactive periods (0/1). The system quantifies activity through an active score and assesses daily routines by comparing these scores against the long-term norms. Key Outcomes/Contributions: The findings reveal that low-resolution data can effectively monitor lifestyle patterns without compromising privacy. The active scores and regularity assessments calculated using correlation coefficients offer a comprehensive view of residents' daily activities and any deviations from the established patterns. This study contributes to the literature by validating the efficacy of low-resolution data in lifestyle monitoring systems and underscores the potential of smart meters in enhancing elderly people's care.

Developing a telepresence robot for interpersonal communication with the elderly in a home environment.

"Telepresence" is an interesting field that includes virtual reality implementations with human-system interfaces, communication technologies, and robotics. This paper describes the development of a telepresence robot called Telepresence Robot for Interpersonal Communication (TRIC) for the purpose of interpersonal communication with the elderly in a home environment. The main aim behind TRIC's development is to allow elderly populations to remain in their home environments, while loved ones and caregivers are able to maintain a higher level of communication and monitoring than via traditional methods. TRIC aims to be a low-cost, lightweight robot, which can be easily implemented in the home environment. Under this goal, decisions on the design elements included are discussed. In particular, the implementation of key autonomous behaviors in TRIC to increase the user's capability of projection of self and operation of the telepresence robot, in addition to increasing the interactive capability of the participant as a dialogist are emphasized. The technical development and integration of the modules in TRIC, as well as human factors considerations are then described. Preliminary functional tests show that new users were able to effectively navigate TRIC and easily locate visual targets. Finally the future developments of TRIC, especially the possibility of using TRIC for home tele-health monitoring and tele-homecare visits are discussed.

Development of a decentralized telehomecare monitoring system.

Although the usefulness of telehomecare has been recognized, and all technologies required are readily available, expectations for its widespread adoption have not been realized. This paper presents the development of a portable telehomecare monitoring system (PTMS). What sets this work apart from most other systems is the focus on a highly decentralized monitoring model and the portable nature of the system. We believe that this is the approach that is needed to make such systems economically viable and acceptable to the end-users. The PTMS is a decentralized system, in which a single household is the fundamental unit for sensing, data transmission, data storage and analysis. It is not necessary to subscribe service from a health welfare center, and the infrastructure required is minimal, too. Equipped with different sensors, the PTMS can be used for long-term personal health data management in a home environment, and it can be easily implemented in a home environment at very low cost. Similar to the largescale telehomecare systems, the PTMS also provides caregivers with convenient access to the health data and real-time event-driven messages in urgent situations. Several PTMS applications are described in this paper, including environmental monitoring, monitoring of activities of daily living, a radiofrequency identification (RFID)-based entrance guard system, sleep quality monitoring, vital sign parameter monitoring, and a tele-presence robot.