Events 
| CRC Colloquium |
| Monday, 01/28/08 16:00 - 18:00 | |
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Jesse Hoey School of Computing University of Dundee Dundee, Scotland DD14HN +44 (0) 1382 384154 jessehoey@computing.dundee.ac.uk The Talking Sink: Automated Assistance for Persons with Dementia. In this talk, I will present a real-time system for assisting persons with dementia during handwashing, an important activity of daily living that often poses difficulty with this population. The system uses only video inputs, and assistance is given as either verbal or visual prompts, or through the enlistment of a human caregiver's help. The system must trade off the competing objectives of getting the user's hands clean, reducing caregiver burden, and preserving user feelings of independence. The objectives, actions and video observations are modeled simultaneously with a probabilistic, decision theoretic model, specifically a partially observable Markov decision process, or POMDP. The key strengths of the POMDP are that it is able to deal with uncertainty and multiple, long-term objectives, and that it is able to learn and adapt to user characteristics and context by observing behaviour. I will introduce POMDPs and I will discuss how non-invasive sensing devices such as cameras can be integrated into this model. I will discuss the specific handwashing model, I will show results from an eight week user trial conducted in 2007. I will conclude by showing a sample of other applications that use the same decision theoretic framework, and will discuss the work yet to be done to make this type of system ubiquitous. In particular, I will discuss how communication between the system and the user can be modeled on multiple levels, and the challenges that remain in realising this communication in the real-time system. |
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| Contact | |
| contact-person: | Sven Wachsmuth |
| homepage: | www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ |