UbiCare

UBICARE (Ubiquitous Caregiver) is committed to creating a fully integrated and multidisciplinary program to develop technologies for healthcare pervasive applications.

The project’s specific goals are concerning implementing a monitoring service of the position, attitude, and other parameters of people with cognitive impairment, including but not limited to people with Alzheimer’s disease. The designed system greatly focuses on the following aspects:

• patient’s safety and caregivers’ support;
• supporting independence in the patient’s daily activities;
• identification of periods with loss of cognition and unawareness;
• users ‘ privacy.

More in detail, the following activities are implemented:

• Implementation of a wearable device prototype equipped with a GNSS receiver, accelerometer sensor, simplified interface for requesting help, low power, and small form factor for improved ease of use.
• Implementation of a web-based application for handling the wearable devices, defining the paths and safe areas for each patient under monitoring, accessing historical data to monitor the patient’s habits to activate alarms promptly in case of sudden and radical changes.
• Definition of an overall system architecture that includes the above elements, a monitoring center responsible for all the back-end operations related to monitoring and acting in emergencies, without heavily relying on patient’s family members or tutors.
• Implementation of a pilot demonstrator to showcase the functionalities of the proposed system.

WEST’s main contribution is focused on the first item of this list, and a wearable device is developed as a prototype to provide remote assistance to people with Alzheimer’s disease.