Research Internship on eHealth using Web technologies (LIUPPA, France)

4 to 6 months research internship (Master 2) is available, from now, at the
LIUPPA Laboratory, Anglet, France. The amount of scholarship is 437 EUROS/month.

The sujbject is about using Web technologies (services, linked data, web
semantic modeling) in context-aware and automatic evaluation of elderly
dependency in smart homes and cities.

Context of the Internship:
===========================

According to the United Nations projections, in 2050, the old-age dependency
ratio of the population aged 65 years or over will approximate 51,70% of the
population aged 20-64. For instance, this ratio will approximate 48,2% in
France, 62% in Germany and 44,10% in UK. In healthcare domain, the evaluation of
the autonomy or dependency of a person is of high importance. Indeed, such
evaluation is used by the professionals of health to identify the person’s needs
of assistance, services and allowance. Also, it allows making the right decision
about keeping the person in the health institution, nursing home or
independently at home with or without healthcare monitoring.

Internship Subject:
===================

In a smart home environment, and more globally in a smart city environment,
particular attention and care should be made for dependent people in particular
for elderly since they are left on their own at home or in the city. A
continuous dependency evaluation is of high concern since it can detect the
changes regarding the person’s abilities to achieve elementary daily tasks. In
this subject, we consider a framework for automatic and flexible dependency
evaluation that can notify any changes of the elderly dependency and hence
allows providing him, at time, with required help, assistance and allowance. We
consider the heterogeneity of elderly profiles and service sources that can come
from anywhere from the home or the city. The dependency evaluation takes
benefits from the description model of the elderly and the dynamic composition
of services. The approach considers the activities of daily living (ADL) as used
in the French AGGIR (Autonomy Gerontology Iso-Resources Group) model.

The objective of the application is to make automatic the dependency evaluation
process which is usually done manually in the medical field. The work focused on
the dependency change within the medical AGGIR model, and possibly other
existing models regarding the dependency in ADL of elderly and dependent
persons. Our aim is to move the current situation toward a flexible architecture
and an extensible model linked to opened data referring to a wide variety of
services.

The different observation sources, sensors and services are heterogeneous and
can come from anywhere in the home or the city. These services evaluate the
different variables that affect the ADL. Consequently, the proposed architecture
should be able to detect automatically the dependency situation and changes of
the monitored person and notify these changes, in time, to different
destinations (e.g. locally to a human interface, to the referring doctor,
hospital, nurses, allowance institutions, etc.).

In the current status of this subject, we have modeled the dependency changes
from a dependency group to the lower group and identified priority variables for
the dependency change according the context of the elderly (i.e. the GIR group
defined in the AGGIR model). We described our vision of the flexible
architecture which has to integrate various sources (services, sensors and data)
using mediation tools (e.g. Cilia) and notify the dependency changes.

The candidate has to develop the proposed RDF model, exploring other dependency
models, study the extension of existing dependency evaluation algorithms (e.g.
the extension of the GIR algorithm with heterogeneous sources) and the
experimentation of dependency changes with real heterogeneous sensors and
services composition.

Keywords: Web Services and REST, Cilia, RDF, OWL

Contacts: Roose Philippe (Philippe.Roose@iutbayonne.univ-pau.fr) - LIUPPA, Laborie
Sébastien (Sebastien.Laborie@iutbayonne.univ-pau.fr) - LIUPPA, Tayeb Lemlouma
(Tayeb.Lemlouma@irisa.fr) - IRISA

Received on Tuesday, 9 April 2013 19:48:37 UTC