Towards ambient intelligence for the domestic care of the elderly

In this article we present an integrated system the domestic care of elderly people which is being developed within the RoboCare project. The system is composed of a network of sensors placed in the environment to reconstruct a global situation and a set of robotic and software agents for controlling the environment. Within this framework, the two main components that we describe in this article are: (1) a people and robot localization and tracking system that exploits stereo vision in order to monitor the positions of robots and persons; (2) a supervision framework that is in charge of collecting information about the distributed sensors and monitoring the activities of the assisted person. This article shows how, starting from these two ingredients, we are developing a system prototype for an “intelligent” environment, which acts as a global monitor surveying an assisted elderly person and reacts to the stimuli coming from the environment in order to control its evolution.

[1]  Stephen F. Smith,et al.  A Constraint-Based Method for Project Scheduling with Time Windows , 2002, J. Heuristics.

[2]  Kurt Konolige,et al.  Small Vision Systems: Hardware and Implementation , 1998 .

[3]  Massimo Mecella,et al.  Building Flexible and Cooperative Applications Based on e-Services , 2002 .

[4]  Trevor Darrell,et al.  Integrated Person Tracking Using Stereo, Color, and Pattern Detection , 2000, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[5]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Pfinder: Real-Time Tracking of the Human Body , 1997, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[6]  Larry S. Davis,et al.  W4S : A real-time system for detecting and tracking people in 2 D , 1998, eccv 1998.

[7]  Amedeo Cesta,et al.  A Constraint-Based Architecture for Flexible Support to Activity Scheduling , 2001, AI*IA.

[8]  Larry S. Davis,et al.  W4S: A real-time system detecting and tracking people in 2 1/2D , 1998, ECCV.

[9]  Reha Uzsoy,et al.  Analysis of periodic and event-driven rescheduling policies in dynamic shops , 1992 .

[10]  Pei-Chann Chang,et al.  One-machine rescheduling heuristics with efficiency and stability as criteria , 1993, Comput. Oper. Res..

[11]  R. Y. Tsai,et al.  An Efficient and Accurate Camera Calibration Technique for 3D Machine Vision , 1986, CVPR 1986.

[12]  Leonidas J. Guibas,et al.  Counting people in crowds with a real-time network of simple image sensors , 2003, Proceedings Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[13]  Trevor Darrell,et al.  Plan-view trajectory estimation with dense stereo background models , 2001, Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. ICCV 2001.