Joining semantic and augmented reality to design smart homes for assistance

INTRODUCTION: Smart homes for assistance help compensate cognitive deficits, thus favoring aging in place. However, to be effective, the assistance must be adapted to the abilities, deficits, and habits of the person. Beside the elder, caregivers are the ones who know the person’s needs best. This article presents a Do-it-Yourself approach for helping caregivers designing a smart home for assistance. METHODS: A co-construction process between a caregiver and a virtual adviser was designed. The knowledge of the virtual adviser about smart homes, activities of daily living and assistance is organized in an ontology. The caregiver interacts with the virtual adviser in augmented reality to describe the home and the resident’s habits inside it. The process is illustrated with an ordinary activity: ‘Drink water’. RESULTS: The proposed process highlights two main steps: describing the environment and determining the resident’s habits and the assistance required to improve activity performance. Visual guidance and feedback are provided to ease the process. CONCLUSION: Designing a co-construction process with a virtual adviser allows interactive knowledge sharing with the caregivers who are experts of the person’s needs. Future work should focus on evaluating the prototype presented and providing deeper advice such as highlighting incomplete or incorrect scenarios, or navigation aid.