Transformación inteligente del proceso de cuidados basados en actividades de la vida diaria (ADL) y su intervención con soluciones digitales (TAICare)

Support the long-time caregiving delivery for elderly people at home in order to improve their life quality and that of their carers, making use of sustainable innovative technologies and smart procedures. 

 This scenario is becoming more and more common today. Older people wish to live independently in their homes and to perform daily activities without relying on or asking for external help. For some, provision of support to ADL [1] may become a necessity to enable them to adequately cope with daily living. In this sense, progressive decline of elderly people (known as primary users) in the everyday life can also lead to an increase in the level of stress and burden on caregivers or family members (a.k.a. secondary users). 

The project acronym TAICare corresponds to the pillars of the proposal: Transformation, ADL and Intervention (TAI) for Caregiving (Care). TAI is used in Japanese to indicate the desire for something, in line with the goal that elderly people want to be supported in their daily activities through the proposed digital care transformation system. In more detail, this project will be focused on studying and measuring the ADL tasks performance at home (for primary users), in a transparent way, making use of disruptive devices, technologies and processes, at the same time as it provides a cursory study about stress and burden (for secondary users). Thanks to traditional and standardized methods based on validated scales, we can assess the independence level of elderly people at home [2, 3], and caregivers state [4]. The scientific evidence indicates that evaluation by these measures helps to identify problems that require specific treatment or care [1]. 

Natural and non-intrusive technologies such as Conversational Assistants (CAs) and/or Connected Devices (CDs) at home, allows us to acquire relevant data from users’ interactions to subsequently analyze, with artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, abnormal behaviors at early stages when performing ADL tasks (which may lead to possible cognitive impairment). Besides, related digital solutions can act on daily living to support the long-term caregiving delivery to improve people life quality in a more sustainable and innovative fashion. 

Figure 1 shows a “domotic household” highlighting the main pillars of this proposal. The natural interactions between the older person and distributed devices in the environment provide us the enough data to extract knowledge about ADL performance and set the basis for a caregiving intervention by the system (in a cursory way), and the experts for a deeper analysis.