The elderly citizen’s health care need some radical changes and improvements to alleviate the situation where the quality of service must be enhanced without overburdening the caregivers under the weighty workload. Much of research is done and many researchers all around the world emphasize the importance of assistive technologies. Current technological advancements in communication allow us to build systems which could be useful tools for the caregivers and allow the elderly to live more autonomous and active life. Offering stimulus to the elderly to experience with the technology could lessen the feel of social isolation and ameliorate the quality of service significantly. Shrinking electronics, mobiles and sensors do not bound the use only in homes or facilities, but allow the use in many different environments. While using technology of this kind, the caregivers could give guidance or follow the health status of a mobile elderly citizen in remote fashion and give help if needed. This thesis is also immersing in the matter by producing a Visual Guidance system that utilizes current mobile technology, actuators, sensors and uses a virtual reality as a communication medium between the caregivers and elderly citizens.
The system consists of two different parts combined together to form a real-time communication system between caregivers and elderly citizen. The system uses Android smart phone’s built-in sensors to track the movement of the elderly. Those sensors are location based sensors such as GPS and acceleration and magnetometer sensors. This system provides an open map view of the world where the elderly citizen move. Also to improve the communication between the elderly and caregiver, video and audio communication has been used as one of our research aims. The caregiver can remotely use the smart phone to open video and audio communication with the elderly if needed. The system has been integrated with indicator base smart glasses so that when the elderly citizen are on the move, the caregiver can give directional advices on where and when to go.
The authors used integration testing to evaluate the system and comparing the current system functions with the requirements of the system. Also the authors made sure that the delay with communication was small enough so it would be safe for the caregivers to communicate with the elderly citizen.
For future work we suggested various actions such as integrating indicator based glasses with the Pupil Pro glasses, finding the most appropriate security solutions for the system and testing the system with real-life caregivers and elderly citizen.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:oulo.fi/oai:oulu.fi:nbnfioulu-201505211603 |
| Date | 26 May 2015 |
| Creators | Korvala, T. (Tapio), Raappana, H. (Hannu) |
| Publisher | University of Oulu |
| Source Sets | University of Oulu |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, © Tapio KorvalaHannu Raappana, 2015 |
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