Smart Homes and Health Telematics

We often conceptualize that older adults retire into a life of carefree luxury among palm trees, golf courses, and pristine beaches. Unfortunately, reality differs today - many retire in place, and often it is the case they retire in rural areas far from hospitals and care-giving centers. For instance, over half of the older population in the state of Minnesota lives in small towns away from the center of care, which is Minneapolis/St. Paul. This year, ICOST 2008 aimed at focusing on this important reality and on gerontechnology--the use of technology to enhance the quality of life of older adults in rural lands. We had a strong technical program this year spanning many critical topics incl- ing: remote monitoring and tele-care, access control and privacy preservation, und- standing user requirements and needs, autonomic learning and reasoning about user behavior, activities and contexts, user interface design, middleware for sensing and actuation in smart homes, cognitive assistants, context-aware service provisioning, among other topics. We received a total of 54 submissions of papers, abstracts and posters, from 14 diff- ent countries. Through a blind review process, we accepted 24 full papers, 9 abstracts, and 7 posters. Each submission received two or three reviews with the exception of a few that received four reviews. We are thankful to all the reviewers who helped in the review process including members of the Technical Committee and the additional reviewers that we needed to compensate for unreturned reviews.

Session 1: Assistive Technology to Improve Quality of Life for Older Adults and their Caregivers.- An Intelligent RFID System for Improving Elderly Daily Life Independent in Indoor Environment.- HYCARE: A Hybrid Context-Aware Reminding Framework for Elders with Mild Dementia.- Evaluation of Mobile and Home Based Cognitive Prosthetics.- Session 2: Context Awareness/Autonomous Computing.- An Integrated Approach to Context Specification and Recognition in Smart Homes.- Robust Face Tracking with Suppressed False Positives in Smart Home Environment.- Adaptive Solutions for Access Control within Pervasive Healthcare Systems.- Session 3: Devices, Systems and Algorithms for Vision/Hearing/Cognitive/Communication Impairments.- Patient Sensors: A Data Quality Perspective.- Design of a Smart Continence Management System Based on Initial User Requirement Assessment.- Social Rhythms and Nocturnal Routines in Community Dwelling Older Adults.- Session 4: Home Health Monitoring and Intervention.- Using Event Calculus for Behaviour Reasoning and Assistance in a Smart Home.- Video Monitoring of Vulnerable People in Home Environment.- An Efficient Method for Activity Recognition of the Elderly Using Tilt Signals of Tri-axial Acceleration Sensor.- Session 5: Human-Machine Interface and Ambient Intelligence.- A User Interface Level Context Model for Ambient Assisted Living.- Abstracting Nutritional Information of Food Service Facilities Using the Pervasive Healthy Diet Adviser.- Intelligent Assistive Exoskeleton with Vision Based Interface.- Session 6: Modeling of Physical and Conceptual Information in Intelligent Environments.- Assessment of the Impact of Sensor Failure in the Recognition of Activities of Daily Living.- Keeping Elderly People at Home: A Multi-agent Classification of Monitoring Data.- HESA: A Human-Centric Evolvable Situation-Awareness Model in Smart Homes.- Session 7: Real World Deployments and Experiences in Smart Homes, Hospitals, and Living Communities.- Sharing of Real-Life Experimental Data in Smart Home and Data Analysis Tool Development.- Using Technology to Enhance Aging in Place.- Observing Outdoor Activity Using Global Positioning System-Enabled Cell Phones.- Session 8: Social/Privacy/Security Issues.- MISS: Medicine Information Support System in the Smart Home Environment.- Challenges of Designing Privacy Enhanced Context-Aware Middleware for Assisted Healthcare.- Safety-Ensuring Systematic Design for Service Robots.