Evaluating the Benefits of Smart Technology in In-home Care Practice, Illawarra Retirment Trust (IRT) Foundation

Project Member(s): Dissanayake, G., Ranasinghe, R., Valls Miro, J., Liu, D.

Funding or Partner Organisation: IRT Research Foundation Ltd (IRT Research Foundation Grants)

Start year: 2015

Summary: This project aims to realise practical improvements to IRT in-home care and residential care services through UTS developed assistive technologies. The proposed assistive technologies Navigation, Localization and Shadowing (Follow-Me) developed by the UTS robotics team offer many benefits to senior citizens and are capable of becoming part of many applications in aged care services. Complementing each other, these intelligent assistive technologies improve the assurance elderly citizens need and empower carers to engage in multitude of activities which are more important to deliver quality care. These state of the art technologies are very robust and safe to use in aged care facilities. The study will evaluate the suitability and acceptance of these three technologies through an Expert Advisory Group (EAG) and focus groups comprising residents, carers and management, drawn from the Peakhurst and Woonona IRT facilities. Functions assessed to have the immediate impact will be selected for detailed evaluation. An exemplary prototype device ¿Follow-Me trolley¿ will be cooperatively developed with the IRT project participants and the selected functionalities of these assistive technologies will be incorporated into the prototype device. These technologies will be comprehensively evaluated to demonstrate the benefits of the technologies specifically covering the usability, adaptability, and user-friendliness.

Publications:

Perera, A, Arukgoda, J, Ranasinghe, R & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'Localization system for carers to track elderly people in visits to a crowded shopping mall', 2017 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 2017 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), IEEE, Sapporo, Japan, pp. 1-8.
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Perera, A, Ranasinghe, R & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'A neural network based place recognition technique for a crowded indoor environment', 2017 12th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA), 2017 12th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA), IEEE, Siem Reap, Cambodia, pp. 1937-1942.
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Ranasinghe, R & Kodagoda, S 1970, 'Spatial prediction in mobile robotic wireless sensor networks with network constraints', 2016 14th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), 2016 14th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), IEEE, Phuket, Thailand, pp. 1-6.
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Wu, K, Ranasinghe, R & Dissanayake, G 1970, 'Active recognition and pose estimation of household objects in clutter', 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE, Seattle, pp. 4230-4237.
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FOR Codes: Expanding Knowledge in Engineering, Control Systems, Robotics and Automation, Expanding Knowledge in Technology, Control engineering, mechatronics and robotics, EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE

Acknowledgement of Country

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation, the Bidiagal people and the Gamaygal people, upon whose ancestral lands our university stands. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.