Towards Independent Assisted Living: The Application of Intelligent Context-Aware Systems

The changing demographic profile of the population has potentially challenging social, geopolitical, and financial consequences for individuals, families, the wider society, and governments globally. The demographic change will result in a rapidly growing elderly population with healthcare implications including Alzheimer type conditions (a leading cause of dementia). Dementia requires long term care to manage the negative behavioral symptoms which are primarily exhibited in terms of agitation and aggression. This paper considers the issues and challenges implicit in the management of Alzheimer type conditions and dementia with a discussion around independent assisted living. Context is introduced with consideration of contextual information and the nature of knowledge. Context processing is discussed. We postulate that the challenges lie in the effective realization of independent assisted living, achieving this remains an open research question.