Assist-Me - A Volunteer Mobile Emergency System to Assist Elderly People

Assisting elderly people in emergency situations is very important to improve their quality of life. This assistance can be done with the help of volunteers using technology and in particular pervasive and mobile computing. We propose in this paper Assist-Me, a smart system aimed at assisting elderly people in case of emergency. The goal is to enhance elderly people daily life independence and autonomy, in indoor and outdoor environments, by offering flexible and faster assistance in emergency situations via social intervention offered by volunteers. We believe that our solution can alleviate the unnecessary intervention of emergency center, provide a flexible volunteering intervention and better serve elderly people in needs. Assist-Me includes two smartphone applications: one for elderly people that require emergency assistance and the second for volunteers who receive the request. Assist-Me manages emergency situations by automatically selecting appropriate volunteers based on fuzzy-logic engine. The implementation of the engine is also presented in this paper.