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
Presented in IEEE SMC 2006
Oct. 2006

• The aging of baby boomers has become a social and economic challenge
– Population:
• In USA alone, population over age 65 is expected to hit 70 million by 2030, doubling from 35 million in 2000, and similar increases are expected worldwide (MIT’s TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
July/August 003).
– Expenditure:
• Expenditure for health-care projected to rise to 15.9% of the GDP
($2.6 trillion) by 2010 (Digital 4Sight’s Health Care Industry
Study).
– Unless the cost of senior care can be significantly reduced by technological means, it could bankrupt the already shaky social security and medicare systems.

• Move-away from the nuclear family household and the increasingly youth-oriented society
– Leaves many people to their own means in receiving health care and satisfaction from life.
– Only 10% of elderly people of age 65-85 and 25% of those of age 85 and above in the USA are institutionalized
(National Institute of Aging).
– Numbers of elderly people living alone in Korea has increased 100% in the last ten years.
– Many suffer from deteriorating sensing and interacting capabilities, such as memory, eye sight, hearing, dexterity and mobility.
– Many suffer from chronic diseases

• 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 theoreticallygrounded tests will be established
– Detailed comprehensive evaluation carried out by professionals in real facilities (WUSTL)

• Activity Reminder
• Vital Sign Measurement
• Personal Belonging Localization
• Personal Behavior Profiling
• Emergency Detection

I-Living System Architecture Design
(Gateway Mode)
• Assited 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
(Gateway Mode)
• ALH and Smart
Devices can connect to Internet via
Gateway Router
•
Assisted Living
Service Provider
(ALSP) Server database is the central database where all data is stored (vital sign, reminder, personnel information, role access policy, logs, etc.)

I-Living System Architecture Design
(Gateway Mode)
• Clients of ALSP
Server include:
Caregiver,
Clinician,
Designated
Relatives of the
AP, and the AP him/herself

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

I-Living System Architecture Design
(Cellphone Mode)
• This also allows assisted-living service when the AP is out-ofhome

System Architecture Design of
Assisted-Living-Hub (ALH)
• Device Monitoring
Daemons: Detecting the join and leave 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.

System Architecture Design of
Assisted-Living-Hub (ALH)
• Unified Application-
Peripheral
Communication
APIs: Encapsulates the underlying networking APIs
(e.g. Bluetooth,
Conventional
Internet, ZigBee,
Infrared) to a unified networking API.

System Architecture Design of
Assisted-Living-Hub (ALH)
• Other Java APIs from
J2ME/J2SE: J2ME shall be provided if the
ALH is a PDA; J2SE is provided if the ALH is a PC
•
Internet Heartbeat
Daemon: Checking whether the Gateway
Router is alive. In case of Gateway Router failure/recovery, it shall be in charge of activating/deactivating the Bluetooth
Cellphone Modem

System Architecture Design of
Assisted-Living-Hub (ALH)
• ALH Main Deamon:
Activating/Deactivati ng specific assisted living applications
(e.g. taking oximeter readings, reminding)

• 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

Current Demo Implementation
(Reminder)
1. Clinician input the reminder schedule: e.g. Take oximeter readings twice a day for one month
2. The reminders are saved in ALSP
Server database as an XML
3. The reminder application in ALH polls the reminder
XML, and reminds when it is time.

Current Demo Implementation (Vital
Sign Reading)
1. Bluetooth Device
Monitoring Daemon discovers the Bluetooth
Oximeter (once it is turned on)
2. Oximeter Reading
Application on ALH reads the oximeter and upload the reading into
ALSP Server database
3. Clinician browses the oximeter reading history at his office.

• Center for Future Health (CFH), University of
Rochester
– Key component: visual system for object recognition and tracking
– Our research complements CFH in two aspects
• Focus on assisted living environment; CFH is for nursing homes and hospitals
• Focus on open software architecture
• None-intrusive sensing instead of visual system

• Aware Home, Georgia Tech
– Focuses on context awareness
– Ours focus on QoS provisioning, wireless networking, security and privacy, HCI
• Smart In-Home Monitoring System,
University of Virginia
– Focus on non-intrusive data collection
– The data management system is complementary to our research.

• Age-in-Place Advanced Smart-Home System, Intel
– Help elderly people with Alzheimer’s diseases
– The focus is not on systems reliability, robustness, security, and wireless coexistance.
• To our best knowledge, we are the first to
– advocate an open environment that allows devices from different vendors to co-exist and collaborate
– Working with experienced medical and health care experts at Washing University in Saint Louis in employing a comprehensive, systematic HCI-based methodology for evaluation among real-world elderly people.

• 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
• Implemented 2 demo applications for proof-ofconcept