I-Living: An Open System Architecture for Assisted Living
Qixin Wang, Wook Shin, Xue Liu, Zheng Zeng, Cham Oh, Bedoor K. AlShebli, Marco Caccamo, Carl A.
Gunter, Elsa Gunter, Jennifer Hou, Karrie Karahalios, and Lui Sha
Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Population Aging
• Table compiled by the U.S. Administration on Aging based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Aging of the baby boomer has become a social and economical issue.
In the United States alone, the number of people over age 65 is expected to hit 70 million by 2030, almost doubling from 35 million in 2000.
Percentage of People 65+ and 85+
People over age 65 are expected to constitute 20% of the population in 2030.
Similar increases are expected worldwide.ex.Numbers of elderly people living alone in Korea has increased 100% in the last ten years
Table compiled by the U.S. Administration on Aging based on data
from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Similar Expenses Worldwide
SOURCE: United Nations ▪ “Population Aging ▪ 2002”
2002
SOURCE: United Nations ▪ “Population Aging ▪ 2002”
2030
Consequences
• Along with the increase of the 65+ population, the expenditures of the United States for health care will project to rise to 15.9% of the GDP ($2.6 trillion) by 2010.
-- Health care industry study, Digital Foresight
• Many people will stay at home, rather than being consigned to expensive retirement homes.– Even today, only 10% of people of age 65-85 and
25% of those of age >= 85 are institutionalized.– Privacy and dignity are major factors for this.
How Can Technology Help?
• Time Driven Reminders of Daily Activities:
Butler PC– Serves as the
intelligence.– Sends reminder
messages to wireless-enabled appliances.
– Closes the loop with RFID or other localization techniques.
– Takes action in the lack of response: A reminder can go on 2 more times, until a designated helper is notified.
Jennifer, It is 11:30am.Time to take your Insulin injection before meal.
Example Scenarios
• Activity Reminder
• Vital Sign Measurement
• Personal Belonging Localization
• Emergency Detection
• A secure Internet channel for sending/updating the prescription record (and/or other commands) to/at the home PC
• Wireless-enabled electronic appliances and vital sign meters.
• RFID/Ubisense (or other localization techniques): tags on clothes, eyeglasses, shoes, medical bottles, dinnerware, etc, and portable/fixed RFID readers in the environment.
Technologies Needed
Putting All the Pieces Together
Home Environment
A. L. Device MonitoringService
Internet
Butler PC
IEEE 802.11WLAN
Clinicians
Design Goals• Dependability:
– Critical Services will be failure safe– High availability– Robustness
• Low Cost and Flexibility– Open to low-cost third-party devices– Assumption, protocol, QoS guarantee discrepancies are to
be discovered by machine checkable means• Security and Privacy
– Different levels of info disclosure to different roles– Authentication, Encryption, and Anti-DOS (Denial-Of-
Service)• QoS Provisioning
– Timing, reliability, criticality guarantees– Over wireless and wireline
• Wireless Interference Mitigation– Bluetooth v.s. IEEE 802.11b– IEEE 802.11a v.s. Microwave– QoS guarantee under wireless interference
• Human Computer Interfaces– Lightweight– Easy-to-Use– Safe and Robust to user mistakes– Provide different control levels of info disclosure
• Thorough Evaluation and User Group Studies– Evaluated in terms of
• the extent to which the technology help elderly people with their independent living in the home or assisted living facilities
• their attitudes toward deploying these technologies
– Different hypothesis amenable to theoretically-grounded tests will be established
– Detailed comprehensive evaluation carried out by professionals in real facilities (UIUC and WUSTL)
I-Living System Architecture Design (Gateway Mode)
• Assisted Person (AP)’s Home covered by Wireless LAN (WLAN)
• Gateway Router connects AP home WLAN to the Internet
• Assisted Living Hub (ALH) manages dumb devices through peripheral network (e.g. Bluetooth)
I-Living System Architecture Design (Cellphone Mode)
• In case of the Gateway Router failure, A Bluetooth Cellphone can dial up as a cellphone modem
• ALH and Smart Device associate with the cellphone modem through bluetooth network
System Architecture Design of Assisted-Living-Hub (ALH)
• Device Monitoring Daemons: Detecting the entry and leaving of various assisted living devices (e.g. Bluetooth oximeter, Bluetooth scale, ZigBee accelerometers etc.)
• Device Registry Service: Local database on what devices are available, and the proxy objects to access the corresponding devices.
Security Mechanisms
• To protect information confidentiality (different visibility to different roles)– Partial Encryption:
• e.g. first encrypt the vital sign reading using the key between AP and clinician; then encrypt the whole message (with administrative info) using the key known to AP, ALSP Server and the clinician. Therefore, although the message is stored in ALSP Server, but ALSP Server cannot read the vital sign.
• To ensure data integrity in the home WLAN with link-level authentication and encryption– Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 Personal (WPA-
PSK)
• Propose using specialized USB memory stick to deliver encryption keys
Related Work
• Center for Future Health (CFH), University of Rochester– Key component: visual system for object
recognition and tracking
• Aware Home, Georgia Tech– Focuses on context awareness
• Smart In-Home Monitoring System, University of Virginia
• Age-in-Place Advanced Smart-Home System, Intel– Help elderly people with Alzheimer’s
diseases
In Situ Pilot Study
User Interface for Clinicians
User Interface for Residents
Photo Collage
Interface for Family and Friends
Conclusion• Study showed people can and will use the I-Living
system.• Openess and Flexibility is provided by deploying Device
Registry Service, Proxy, Unified Application-Peripheral Communication APIs, XML and Java technology.
• Availability is ensured by enabling system to operate both in the Gateway Mode and Cellphone Mode.
• Security and Privacy are addressed partial encryption, WPA2-PSK
Thank You!
