The use of computational techniques to improve compliance to reminders within smart environments – Phase 3

Abstract

The aim of REMIND is to create an International and Intersectoral network to facilitate the exchange of staff to progress developments in reminding technologies for persons with dementia that can be deployed in smart environments. The consortium is comprised of an International network of 7 academic beneficiaries, 5 nonacademic beneficiaries and 4 partners from Third Countries, all of whom are committed to progressing the notion of reminding technologies within smart environments. The focus of REMIND is to develop staff and beneficiary/partner skills in the areas of user centered design and behavioral science coupled with improved computational techniques which in turn will offer more appropriate and efficacious reminding solutions. This will be further supported through research involving user centric studies into the use of reminding technologies and the theory of behaviour change to improve compliance of usage. Research objectives will be focused within the domain of smart environments. A smart environment can be viewed as having the ability to sense its surroundings through embedded sensors and following processing of the sensed information, adjust the environment through actuators to offer an improved experience for the inhabitant. Even though the availability, cost, size and battery life of sensing technology have all improved in recent years, the uptake of real smart environments has been limited. This is mainly related to the effort required to support the technical deployments and the lack of a business model to support a service provider capable of offering support to a large number of environments. In addition, there is a limit to the amount of scenarios which can be facilitated by such environments; this limit is directly related to the number of sensors available