Usability of Smartbands by the Elderly Population in the Context of Ambient Assisted Living Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, the Portuguese population is aging at a fast pace. The situation is more severe in the interior regions of the country, where the rural areas have few people and have been constantly losing population; these are mostly elderly who, in some cases, live socially isolated. They are also often deprived of some types of social, health and technological services. One of the current challenges with respect to the elderly is that of improving the quality of life for those who still have some autonomy and live in their own residences so that they may continue living autonomously, while receiving the assistance of some exterior monitoring and supporting services. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm demonstrates great potential for creating technological solutions in this area as it aims to seamlessly integrate information technology with the daily lives of people. In this context, it is necessary to develop services that monitor the activity and health of the elderly in real time and alert caregivers or other family members in the case of an unusual event or behaviour. It is crucial that the technological system is able to collect data in a nonintrusive manner and without requiring much interaction with the elderly. Smartband devices are very good candidates for this purpose and, therefore, this work proposes assessing the level of acceptance of the usage of a smartbands by senior users in their daily activities. By using the definition of an architecture and the development of a prototype, it was possible to test the level of acceptance of smartbands by a sample of the elderly population—with surprising results from both the elderly and the caregivers—which constitutes an important contribution to the research field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The evaluation showed that most users did not feel that the smartband was intrusive to their daily tasks and even considered using it in the future, while caregivers considered that the platform was very intuitive.