L. Spiru1, I. Solheim2, I. Turcu1, J. Rovira Simon3
Abstract
The idea behind MobileSage (2011-2014) is to provide elderly with context-aware, personalized, and location-sensitive tools that allow them to carry out and solve everyday tasks and problems in the self-serve society when and where they oc-cur, “just-in-time”. Two innovative services are provided for the advancements of older people’s independence and mobility in the daily life, including in particular transportation and travel. The means is instantiated by a personal agent on the smartphone, which provides a help-on-demand service. This service offers rel-evant, accessible, and usable content upon request, in the form of multimodal and personalized instruction and guidance, enabling people to help themselves.
1. Introduction
The rising ageing population all over the world demands novel solutions for new models of social- and healthcare services to support independent living and enhance quality of life. The need and also impact on society is on a global scale. Modern elderly [1] are increasingly looking for useful, user friendly, and personalized ICT services that add value to their active and mobile live styles and that can help them to stay active despite various impairments. Here MobileSage provides a timely approach and solution.
Two innovative services are provided for the advancements of the elderlies’ independence and mobility in the daily lives, focusing in particular on transportation and travel solutions. The means is instantiated by a personal agent on the smartphone that provides a Help-on-Demand service. This service offers relevant, accessible, and usable content upon request, in the form of multimodal and personalized instruction and guidance, enabling people to help themselves.
Users in the three participating countries Norway, Romania, and Spain have been systematically in-volved in all stages of the innovation process: comprehensive studies of user needs, definitions of re-quirements, and evaluation of solutions. There are partners in all three countries dedicated to user involvement and piloting with users. A special attention was paid to the related ethical issues (informed consent, management of end-user withdrawal and exit strategy, personal data protection, ethical control instruments within the three national pilots of the MobileSage project [3].
[1] Ana Aslan International Foundation, lsaslan@brainaging.ro Piata M. Kogalniceanu Nr.1, 050064 Bucharest 5, Romania [2] Norsk Regnesentral/Norwegian Computing Center, solheim@nr.no, Gaustadalléen 23A, 0373 Oslo, Norway
[3] Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo S.A., jordirs@tid.es, Plaça Ernest Lluch i Martí 5, 08019 Barcelona, Spain
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2. The MobileSage project – overview
1MobileSage stands for Situated Adaptive Guidance for the Mobile Elderly. Its aim is to give the modern elderly a smart agent that provides relevant, accessible, usable, and multimodal assis-tance for carrying out and solving everyday tasks and problems in the self-serve society, whenever and wherever they occur.
1. MobileSage ComponentsMobileSage consists of two components:the Help-on-Demand (HoD) mobile application and the Content ManagementService (CMS).Figure 1 shows the overall architecture.The Dialog Manager is in contact with the Reasoning Service from the Localization Service which has the responsibility to determine the user’s location with highest possible accuracy, based on technologies like A-GPS,WLAN,GSM/GPRS,and NFC, and triangulation methods. See illustration 1 below.
Fig. 1. System architecture and major building blocks for HoD (left) and CMS (right)
2. Content Management Service: The CMS is a cloud service running on a web server. Content producers interact with the service’s Dialog Manager, which in turn controls the User
Inter-[1] Help-on-Demand Service: The HoD application is the personal agent, a thick-client application running on a smart-phone. It is built up in a service-oriented manner, see Figure 1. The user interacts with the Dialog Manager through the User Interface. The Dialog Manager utilizes information from the Profile Service taking care of the user profile. The user profile stores personal preferences and usage patterns. User behaviour and User Interface events are logged and analyzed by the Personalization Service, upon which the user profile is readjusted.
face on a User Agent like a web browser. The logic for handling the multimodal content lies in the Content Manager, which has a modular design to be able to add additional modalities in a simple way. The prototype supports the modules Video (with or without captions), Im-age, Audio, Text, and Formatted Text (basically simplified HTML). The content is stored by the Content Service. It is also possible to refer to content located elsewhere (e.g., from other video services).
3. System Design
For the HoD service, a user profile lays the ground for personalization and adaption of the service.
It contains the user’s settings and preferences, such as font size, emergency number, accepted media types, and additional languages. Also other parameters are stored there, including usage log. This log is the basis for system adaptation. Screenshots of the HoD are shown in Figure 2.
Both primary and tertiary users have requested that it should be possible to associate content with specific locations or points of interest. However, it should also be possible to link certain content to several locations (e.g., “how to buy a ticket” is valid for any ticket machine in the Oslo area). More-over, there are situations where several pieces of content are relevant at a single location (e.g., how to validate a ticket, arrival time of the next bus, or choosing the correct platform for departure).
Fig.2,Help-on-Demand main screen and ticket buying interface
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4. Conclusion and outlook
We have presented the MobileSage prototype, a service for delivery of context-aware, personalized help content in an on-demand manner. MobileSage incorporates the needs of primary, secondary, and tertiary users and has been evaluated by primary users in user tests.
The aspects of content provision include multimodality and internationalization to take care of user personalization, multiresolution
and multi-rate for device adaptivity, and location-aware media searches for relevance. It has been shown that the system can index both internal and external media databases.
The MobileSage project innovates in the area of supporting seniors to train, regain or compensate their indoor and outdoor mobility [4]. This support is equally important for old people carers [5]. In terms of acceptance, the general belief is that people become more reluctant to advanced tech-nologies as they grow old. The field trials of this project revealed that including the several seniors with mild to moderate memory impairments from the group were interested in this kind of support, and that their reluctance is mainly due to stigma and the fear that they will be unable to learn how to use a smart device. The main requirements for a high acceptance are the user centered design, friendly interfaces, easy access to various functions of the application and a good initial training with a human assistant especially in case of people with cognitive dysfunctions.
Acknowledgements
This work is partly funded by the European Commission through the AAL Joint Programme, the Norwegian Research Council, and national bodies in Spain and Romania. The authors would like to thank the consortium members for their valuable contributions and all individuals involved in the user studies for their feedback.
References
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Age Concern Books, England, London, 2005.
[2] Till Halbach and Trenton Schulz. MobileSage – A prototype based case study for delivering context-aware, personalized, on-demand help content. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advances in Human oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Services, Venice (Italy), October 2013. IARIA, IARIA XPS Press.
[3] L. Spiru, U. Cortes et al, Legal concerns regarding AmI Assisted Living in the elderly,
worldwide and in Romania, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), ISSN: 1867-8211, Springer Verlag, 2009 [4] S.C. Webber, M.M. Porter and V.H. Menec. “Mobility in Older Adults: A Comprehensive Framework”, The Gerontologist, vol. 50, no.4, pp. 443-450, 2010
[5] L. McInnes. “Importance of maintaining mobility to elderly health”, Aging Health, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 165-167, 2011
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