Home healthcare using ubiquitous computing and robot technologies

Abstract

The rapid increase of senior population worldwide is challenging the existing healthcare and support systems. Recently, smart home environments are utilized for ubiquitous health monitoring, allowing patients to stay in the comfort of their homes. In this dissertation, a Cloud-based Smart Home Environment (CoSHE) for home healthcare is presented, which consists of ambient intelligence, wearable computing, and robot technologies. The system includes a smart home which is embedded with distributed environmental sensors to support human localization. Wearable units are developed to collect physiological, motion and audio signals through non-invasive wearable sensors and provide contextual information in terms of the resident's daily activity and location in the home. This enables healthcare professionals to study daily activities, behavioral changes and monitor rehabilitation and recovery processes. The sensor data are processed in a smart home gateway and sent to a private cloud, which provides real-time data access for remote caregivers. Our case studies show that contextual information provided by ubiquitous computing can help better understand the patient's health status. With a robot assistant in the loop, we demonstrated that the CoSHE can facilitate healthcare delivery via interaction between human and robot.