Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is more prevalent than any other disease under the umbrella of dementia (Alzheimer's Association, 2013). Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) are the typical front-line care staff who care for individuals in aging care (Sengupta, Harris-Kojetin, & Ejaz, 2010). The present study investigated the use of a pyramidal training model to teach aging facility staff to be able to conduct trainings and to teach direct care staff antecedent strategies shown to be effective when communicating with individuals with AD. Pyramidal training resulted in two tiers of staff successfully implementing training for subsequent tiers of staff and subsequent staff demonstrated mastery of the trained material. However, during maintenance observations, some decreases were observed both with regard to training integrity as well as implementation of the trained material.

Class of 2008 / Objectives: To determine the number of senior communities within the Tucson area that have access to automated external defibrillators (AED). Methods: Publicly available internet search engines were used to identify a number of various senior communities within the Tucson area. The various communities included senior apartment communities, recreational vehicle parks, and manufactured home parks. A representative employee of the community was interviewed to determine if an AED was accessible to the residents of the community. Results: Thirty senior apartments, eight manufactured home, and twelve RV communities were identified. The communities ranged in size from 22 to 1576 units, with the average being 222 units per community and the mean 232 units per community. IF the 50 senior communities identified only 2 of them had an AED on the premises. Both of the communities that had an AED on premise were RV parks that had a paid security crew that was trained in the use of the AED. Conclusions: In the Tucson senior communities there is a gross under availability of access to life saving equipment in a population that has a higher risk heart attacks and could benefit from having access to an AED.

The purpose of this study was to examine resident policies in assisted living facilities and to recommend consistent policies for resident handbooks. To accomplish this purpose, in the first phase, a mail survey form was developed to determine current resident policies provided in existing assisted living facilities in Virginia. In the second phase, the researcher analyzed each policy from the eight participating assisted living facilities and then compared the policies to determine which policies should be included in resident handbooks. Policies with similar content, but with different names were categorized together. The study employed the content-analysis method, which is oriented to qualitative research. The number of resident policies dealt with in this study totaled 56. The framework for analyzing resident policies was divided into three sections: 1) policies related to administration, 2) policies related to resident services, and 3) resident activities listed in the handbooks. As a result of content analysis and evaluation of policies as they related to the aging process, a total of 27 recommendations were suggested. Two recommendations were suggested based on the findings of the resident handbooks survey, and 25 recommendations were suggested from analysis of the handbooks. The recommendation of resident policies can help staff to manage assisted living facilities efficiently, and the handbooks will be able to offer prospective residents clear information as they make decisions among various assisted living facilities. Moreover, current residents will benefit from lucid and consistent resident handbooks in that they will provide explicit information about policies and services. / Master of Science

The following thesis presents the design for a housing complex. The complex provides homes for two different segments of our population: single families and older or disabled persons and couples. Located in Old Town Alexandria Virginia, the project sits on the banks of the Potomac River. The question of integration is central to this thesis. The first design challenge is to integrate the older persons and persons with disabilities into the community. Successfully done, this will prevent the sense of separation and isolation that can often result when people's physical limitations restrict their access to the world around them. The second design challenge is to integrate the complex itself into an existing, homogenous Old Town Alexandria neighborhood. / Master of Architecture

If Architecture can express the joy of birth and all the infinite aspects of human life, then Architecture can celebrate death as a final rite of passage. Can Architecture celebrate man's transition into the afterlife? How does this celebration translate literally into something tangible? How does this celebration translate figuratively into something tactile? / Master of Architecture

Submitted by Haroudo Xavier Filho (haroudo.xavierfo@ufpe.br) on 2016-04-06T18:16:38Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) SISTEMA DE PREDIÇÃO DE ESTADOS DE TRANSDUTORES PARA AMBIEN.pdf: 2277201 bytes, checksum: 566bf1bfadd889426473a7471d98ef39 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-06T18:16:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) SISTEMA DE PREDIÇÃO DE ESTADOS DE TRANSDUTORES PARA AMBIEN.pdf: 2277201 bytes, checksum: 566bf1bfadd889426473a7471d98ef39 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-26 / CNPq / Nos Ambientes Inteligentes, os dispositivos colaboram entre si para auxiliar o usuário de forma não intrusiva. Uma forma de auxílio é antecipar as ações do usuário e realizá-las por ele ou facilitar a sua realização. Esse trabalho propõe um framework para a predição das ações do usuário pelo aprendizado do seu comportamento e hábitos enquanto ele interage com o Ambiente Inteligente. As ações do usuário é considerada como sendo a troca do valor de um transdutor (sensor ou atuador). A interação do usuário com o Ambiente Inteligente produz o contexto que é utilizado para a predição das ações. O preditor é um algoritmo de classificação supervisionada que aprende os padrões de comportamento do habitante do Ambiente Inteligente. Portanto, a solução proposta pode prover um serviço personalizado e adaptativo ao invés de um conjunto de regras predefinido por humanos. O preditor trabalha apenas com um transdutor alvo e para prever valores de mais transdutores, mais preditores devem ser treinados. A solução proposta é projetada para funcionar automaticamente sem a necessidade de interferência humana. Isso faz com que o habitante do Ambiente Inteligente sinta-se mais confortável já que sua privacidade estará protegida. Todas as informações para treinar o preditor podem ser obtidas diretamente dos transdutores do Ambiente Inteligente. Não existe a necessidade de anotação manual dos dados e nem dados extras como tipo do transdutor, localização do transdutor ou objeto ao qual o transdutor está acoplado. Isso aumenta a facilidade de instalação dos transdutores no Ambiente Inteligente. A saída do preditor pode tanto controlar diretamente um atuador ou ser enviada a um agente de software. Esse agente pode verificar condições de segurança ou requisitos de gerenciamento de energia antes de tomar a decisão. O foco desse trabalho é a geração de uma base de dados com os dados do contexto para o treinamento do preditor responsável por decidir se o transdutor alvo deverá ou não mudar seu valor. Vários parâmetros são considerados como o tamanho do período de treinamento, quantidade de ativações passadas que serão consideradas e quais são os transdutores mais relevantes para a predição. A solução proposta atinge uma melhora significativa para todos os transdutores estudados e a maioria das combinações de parâmetros da geração da base de dados possuem resultados melhores que o caso base. Além disso, os nossos resultados são superiores às outras soluções da literatura. / Smart environments possess devices that collaborate to help the user non-intrusively. One possible aid smart environment offer is to anticipate user’s tasks and perform them on his/her behalf or facilitate the action completion. In this work, we propose a framework that predicts user’s actions by learning his/her behavior when interacting with the smart environment. The user actions are considered as being the value change of a transducer (sensor or actuator). The user interaction with the smart environment produces the context used to predict the actions. The predictor is a supervised classification algorithm that learns the smart environment inhabitant behavior patterns. Therefore, the proposed solution can provide a personalized and adaptive service instead of a human predefined set of rules. The predictor works with only one transducer and to predict the values of several transducers, more predictors must be trained. The proposed solution is designed to work automatically without the need of human interference. That makes the smart environment inhabitant more comfortable since his/her privacy is protected. All the information needed to train the predictor can be obtained directly from the smart environment transducers. There is no need for manual data annotation or extra data such as transducer type, transducer location or which object the transducer is attached to. This facilitates the transducer installation in the smart environment. The predictor output can either control directly an actuator or be sent to an software agent. This software agent can check for security or energy constraints before making the decision. This work focus on prepare datasets and train a predictor that is responsible to decide whether a target transducer value should be changed or not. Several parameters are considered such as the training period size, amount of previous transducer activations considered and which are the most relevant transducers for the prediction. Our solution achieves a significant improvement for all target transducers studied and most combinations of parameters yields better results than the base case. Our results are superior to other solutions in the literature.

Medication reconciliation is a systematic and comprehensive review of medication regimens during care transitions aiming to prevent adverse drug events. Poorly executed transitions negatively impact patient welfare and cause financial burden. Medication-related problems (MRPs) experienced during transitions to an assisted living facility (ALF) were evaluated. Data was collected from pharmacy records for transitions to an ALF over three months, including demographics, medications, potentially inappropriate medications, and MRPs. MRPs were categorized and summarized using descriptive statistics. Forty-five patients (71% female) experienced 59 transitions. Average age was 85.6 years. Median length of stay away from the ALF was three days. There were averages of 18.3 pre-transition medications, 12.5 medications in the discharge orders and/or upon ALF admission, and 15.9 final medications. 979 MRPs were identified, mostly no indication documented, followed by underuse, overuse, and non-adherence. Many of the identified MRPs are potentially preventable. Interventions are needed to reduce MRPs during ALF transitions.

O fenômeno global de envelhecimento populacional está sendo acompanhado pelo rápido crescimento do número de pessoas com algum tipo de deficiência mental ou física, assim como diversas doenças crônicas relacionadas à idade. Devido ao fato de que a maioria dos idosos prefere ficar no conforto de suas residências, é essencial o desenvolvimento de tecnologias que auxiliem os idosos a terem uma vida independente e confortável em seus lares. Em especial, Ambientes Assistidos buscam agir proativamente de forma a auxilar de maneira correta o usuário na execução das suas Atividades de Vida Diária. Devido à grande variabilidade nos níveis de deficiência dos usuários, é fundamental que o Ambiente Assistido seja capaz de fornecer a assistência levando em consideração diversos aspectos relacionados ao usuário, como suas dificuldades, limitações e atividade sendo realizada. Este trabalho propõe um sistema que utiliza uma abordagem baseada nas tecnologias da Web Semântica e no paradigma multiagentes com o objetivo de fornecer assistência personalizada a pessoas idosas e com diversidades funcionais. As características do usuário foram modeladas por uma ontologia OWL, enquanto o mecanismo de reasoning responsável por inferir as preferências relacionadas aos serviços do ambiente foi implementada utilizando a linguagem SWRL. Ainda, os componentes presentes na arquitetura proposta são implementados na forma de agentes com funções específicas. Entre as característica inovadoras da proposta estão a incorporação de um modelo padronizado e internacionalmente conhecido para representar as deficiências, dificuldades e limitações dos usuários e a utilização de uma arquitetura distribuída que possui as características inerentes ao paradigma multiagentes, tais como escalabilidade, flexibilidade e dinamismo. A validação do sistema foi realizada através de sua integração com uma Arquitetura Orientada a Serviços que utiliza uma solução comercial de automação residencial e um simulador de Ambientes Inteligentes, e da sua utilização em três casos de usos definidos pelo projeto AAL Joint Programme. / The global phenomenon of population aging has been followed by the fast growth in the number of people with some kind of mental or physical disability and chronic illnesses associated with old age. Given the fact that the majority of older adults prefer to stay in the comfort of their own homes, it is crucial to develop technologies that help the elderly to live independently and comfortably in their homes. Specifically, Ambient Assisted Living environments aims to act proactively in order to properly assist the elderly and people with functional diversity to perform their Activities of Daily Living. Since these users tend to be greatly variable in regards to functioning and disability levels, it is essential that the ambient provides personalized assistance based on the user’s unique requirements, limitations, preferences, and activity being performed. This work proposes a system that uses an approach based on the Web Semantic technologies and the multiagent paradigm with the goal of providing personalized assistance to the elderly and people with functional diversity. The user’s characteristics were modeled using an OWL ontology and a reasoning mechanism responsible to infer the preferences related to the ambient services was implemented using SWRL rules. Furthermore, the proposed architecture components were implemented as agents with specific roles. Among the proposed system innovative features are the incorporation of a standardized and international model used to represent the user’s functional and disability information, and the use of a distributed architecture having the multiagent paradigm features, such as scalability, flexibility, and dynamism. The system’s validation was accomplished by its integration with a Service Oriented Architecture that uses a commercial automation solution and a smart environment simulator, and by its use in three use cases developed by the AAL Joint Programme.

A população idosa mundial está crescendo e, com ela, o número de diagnósticos de doenças relacionadas à velhice como, por exemplo, declínios cognitivos também. Essas doenças costumam afetar a autonomia do idoso no seu lar, especialmente no que se refere à realização de atividades diárias. Com isso em vista, é preciso empregar cuidadores e serviços de saúde que acabam por implicar em altos custos. Nesse sentido, surge a necessidade de conceber sistemas robustos, automatizados, utilizáveis e de baixo custo para a assistência pessoal. A concepção desses sistemas faz menção à área de Ambientes de Vivência Assistida. Portanto, esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem que beneficia os sistemas para Ambientes de Vivência Assistida com a capacidade de prever ações humanas para a facilitação de atividades diárias, particularmente quando declínios cognitivos relacionados à elas ocorrerem. Nesse sentido, foi concebido um meta-modelo semântico para a geração de modelos conceituais de contexto e de comportamento, compostos pelas ações humanas. A partir disso, a previsão de ações (informação de suporte) é realizada por um mecanismo de predição e inferência composto por um modelo semântico probabilístico. A abordagem é demonstrada através de um estudo de caso cujo cenário representa uma situação de declínio cognitivo, enfrentada por um usuário, que impede a condução de uma atividade diária. Então, o mecanismo de predição e inferência, utilizando o modelo semântico probabilístico, prevê qual a ação mais adequada que facilite a conclusão da atividade. Essa previsão é avaliada para aferir o quão bem um usuário seria auxiliado, isto é, se a operação prevista foi por ele realizada. Para isso, foi utilizado um dataset relacionado ao cenário do estudo de caso e medidas de desempenho como a precisão, a revocação e a medida-F. Os resultados dessa avaliação se mostraram promissores sendo, em média, 69,5% para a precisão, 100% para a revocação e 81% para a medida-F. As principais contribuições deste trabalho dizem respeito ao meta-modelo semântico a partir do qual pesquisas na área deste trabalho podem utilizar para gerar modelos de comportamento, e ao modelo semântico probabilístico que realiza predição através de raciocínio incerto sobre os modelos de comportamento, propiciando decisões mais precisas para auxiliar usuários com declínio cognitivo. / The world’s elderly population is growing and, with it, the number of diagnoses of diseases related to old age, such as cognitive declines as well. These diseases usually affect the autonomy of the elderly in their home, especially when it comes to performing daily activities. With this in mind, it is necessary to employ caregivers and health services that end up implying high costs. In this sense, the need arises to design robust, automated, usable and low-cost systems for personal assistance. The design of these systems makes reference to the area of Ambient Assisted Living. Therefore, this dissertation proposes an approach that benefits the Ambient Assisted Living systems with the ability to predict human actions for the facilitation of daily activities, particularly when cognitive declines related to them occur. In this sense, a semantic meta-model was conceived for the generation of conceptual models of context and behavior, composed by human actions. From this, the prediction of actions (information of support) is realized by a mechanism of prediction and inference composed by a probabilistic semantic model. The approach is demonstrated through a case study whose scenario represents a situation of cognitive decline, faced by a user, that prevents the conduct of a daily activity. Then, the prediction and inference mechanism, using the probabilistic semantic model, predicts the most appropriate action that facilitates the conclusion of the activity. This forecast is evaluated to gauge how well a user would be assisted, that is, if the intended operation was performed by him. For this, a dataset related to the case study scenario and performance measures such as precision, recall, and F-measure were used. The results of this evaluation are promising, averaging 69.5% for precision, 100% for recall and 81% for F-measure. The main contributions of this work are related to the semantic meta-model from which research in the area of this work can be used to generate behavioral models, and to the probabilistic semantic model that performs prediction through uncertain reasoning over behavior models, providing better decisions to help users with cognitive decline.

L'espérance de vie a augmenté dans les dernières décennies et devrait continuer à croître dans les prochaines années. Cette augmentation entraîne de nouveaux défis concernant l'autonomie et l'indépendance des personnes âgées. Le développement d'habitats intelligents est une piste pour répondre à ces défis et permettre aux personnes de vivre plus longtemps dans un environnement sûr et confortable. Rendre un habitat intelligent consiste à y installer des capteurs, des actionneurs et un contrôleur afin de pouvoir prendre en compte le comportement de ses habitants et agir sur leur environnement, pour améliorer leur sécurité, leur santé et leur confort. La plupart de ces approches s'appuient sur la localisation en temps réel des habitants dans leur habitat. Dans cette thèse, une nouvelle approche complète permettant la localisation d'un nombre a priori inconnu d'habitants basée sur le modèle est proposée. Cette approche tire parti des paradigmes, de la théorie et des outils des Systèmes à Événements Discrets. L'utilisation des automates à états finis pour modéliser le mouvement détectable des habitants ainsi que des méthodes permettant de construire ces modèles ont été développées. A partir de ces modèles automates finis, plusieurs algorithmes permettant de localiser de manière efficace les habitants ont été définis. Enfin, plusieurs approches pour l'évaluation des performances de l'instrumentation d'un habitat intelligent pour un objectif de localisation ont été proposées. La méthode a également été totalement implémentée et mise à l'épreuve. Tout au long de cette thèse, les différentes contributions sont illustrées à l'aide de cas d'étude. / Life expectancy has continuously increased in most countries over the last decades and will probably continue to increase in the future. This leads to new challenges relative to the autonomy and the independence of elderly. The development of Smart Homes is a direction to face these challenges and to enable people to live longer in a safe and comfortable environment. Making a home smart consists in placing sensors, actuators and a controller in the house in order to take into account the behavior of their inhabitants and to act on their environment to improve their safety, health and comfort. Most of these approaches are based on the real-time indoor Location Tracking of the inhabitants. In this thesis, a whole new approach for model-based Location Tracking of an a priori unknown number of inhabitants is proposed. This approach is based on Discrete Event Systems paradigms, theory and tools. The usage of Finite Automata (FA) to model the detectable motion of the inhabitants as well as different methods to create such FA models have been developed. Based on these models, algorithms to perform efficient Location Tracking are defined. Finally, several approaches aiming at evaluating the relevance of the instrumentation of a Smart Home with the objective of Location Tracking are proposed. The approach has also been fully implemented and tested. Throughout the thesis, the different contributions are illustrated on case studies. / In den meisten Industrieländern ist die Lebenserwartung in den letzten Jahrzehnten fortlaufend gestiegen und wird höchstwahrscheinlich noch weiter steigen. Dieser Anstieg führt zu neuen Herausforderungen hinsichtlich der Autonomie und Unabhängigkeit von älteren Menschen. Die Entwicklung von intelligenten Wohnungen ist ein Weg diesen Herausforderungen zu begegnen und es den Menschen zu ermöglichen länger in einer sicheren und komfortablen Umgebung zu leben. Dazu stattet man solcheWohnungen mit Sensoren, Aktoren sowie einem Controller aus. Dies erm öglicht es, in Abhängigkeit vom Verhalten der Bewohner, dieWohnumgebung so zu beein_ussen, dass sich Sicherheit, Gesundheit und Komfort verbessern. Ansätze, die dies zum Ziel haben, basieren meistens auf Methoden, die es ermöglichen Menschen innerhalb ihrer Wohnung in Echtzeit zu lokalisieren. In dieser Dissertation wird daher ein neuer Ansatz für eine modellbasierte Lokalisierung einer a priori unbekannten Anzahl von Bewohnern vorgestellt. Dieser Ansatz fuÿt auf der Theorie, den Paradigmen und den Werkzeugen aus dem Gebiet der ereignisdiskreten Systeme. Es werden endliche Automaten eingesetzt, um die von den Sensoren erfassbaren Bewohnerbewegungen zu modellieren. Verschiedene Verfahren zur Erzeugung solcher Automaten werden gezeigt. Basierend auf diesen Modellen warden Algorithmen de_niert, mittels derer die Bewohner wirksam lokalisiert werden können. Abschlieÿend werden Methoden vorgeschlagen, die dazu dienen die Relevanz der Sensorinstrumentierung für die Lokalisierung zu bewerten. Die entwickelten Verfahren werden in der Dissertation durchgehend anhand von Fallbeispielen erläutert. Der gesamte Ansatz wurde implementiert und erprobt.