HBMS

Human Behavior Monitoring and Support

Motivation

We are facing unprecedented demographic changes. The European population aged 60 and above is rising by more than 2 million per year. Life expectancy is increasing and so is the number of people who will need support and care.

On the other hand, working population is decreasing.

So we have to find innovative solutions of providing support and care to elderly persons. This is the key challenge of research in the field of Active and Assisted Living (AAL), formerly  Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). In particular, AAL aims at enabling elderly persons to live longer and as autonomously as possible in their familiar environment, decreasing healthcare costs and helping them to reach a higher quality of life.

AAL takes up the challenge of the ageing society

HBMS in a nutshell

HBMS is an AAL project. IT’s focus is on unobtrusively supporting people in doing their activities of daily life (ADL) autonomously in their homes: from basic ADL like dressing, via instrumental ADL like meal preparation, homework, loundry, using the phone and other technical devices, up to managing finances and using on-line (business) processes.

Often, aging is associated with declining memory performance. This affects the ability of doing the daily activities smoothly and thus limits the autonomy of a person concerned. HBMS – Human Behavior Monitoring and Support is to give such persons individual “aid-to-memory” support in order to keep their autonomy as long as possible.

The memory aid paradigm distinguishes HBMS from other approaches, as it aims at deriving advise and support services from integrated models of abilities, current context and episodic knowledge that an individual had or has, but has temporarily forgotten. As a consequence, HBMS is supposed to enter a person’s life, e.g., together with some other domotic components, before his or her memory shows dropouts.

HBMS, the memory aid for the daily life

HBMS  “learns” via unobtrusive and secure activity recognition, abstraction and integration the person’s individual episodical knowledge, i.e. how she/he is doing things.  This individual knowledge “learned in time” can then be used as needed to compensate gaps in the episodic memory of the respective person.

As sketched in the figure, the core of a HBMS system is the Human Cognitive Model (HCM).  It preserves the episodic memory of a person in the form of conceptual models of behavior linked to context information related to these activities.

HBMS Mission

Summing up, the project mission is to develop an Ambient Assistive Living System, which is able to

  • monitor an individual carrying out activities (e.g. of daily life),
  • to abstract, aggregate and integrate the observed behavior into an individual human cognitive model and
  • to assist the individual in cases of need retrieving knowledge from the human cognitive model (HCM)

Funding

Many AAL projects are currently funded by International and National initiatives. HBMS can be seen a a supplement to this initiatives has been funded by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung, Heidelberg.