Smart Environments
- Smart home for Health
The development of a smart apartment for Health and Wellness monitoring within INL targets the study and assessment of daily-life activities of the elderly in their homes. The aim is to identify life cycles and their evolutions and thus be able to establish “life trajectories” for a given patient. The Biomedical Sensors Group has demonstrated that a modification in a subject’s behavior can be an early indication of a decrease in the patient’s autonomy or of the onset of a pathology.
It is obviously necessary to improve the long term monitoring of patients to anticipate problems that could occur and to ensure an optimal quality of life for elderly, enabling them to maintain their independence and remain in their own homes. Based on this data, it should be possible to better adapt the environment to the subject, to help the physicians conveniently and remotely monitor their patients, to reduce the institutionalization of the elderly and to reduce the need of costly emergency care.
- (Car) Driver monitoring
Integration of sensors in the car driver’s environment, in particular for the evaluation of behavioral and psycho-physiological parameters, is a challenge in which the Biomedical Sensors Group is actively involved with leading car manufacturers. Such evaluation requires a multiparametric approach, taking into account information concerning the vehicle dynamics and the actions and physiology (e.g. the objective assessment of emotional reactivity) of the driver.
In a driving situation, measurement of physiological parameters must be non-intrusive and this constraint imposes the design and implementation of exo-sensors whose presence does not affect the driver’s usual behavior. The sensors, as well as the associated conditioning electronics, have to be appropriately located in the immediate environment of the driver
