Completed Projects

fearless

Project Details

Funding

AAL-JP

Grant Number

AAL 2010-3-020

Duration

2011/07/01 – 2014/06/30

Contact

Martin Kampel

Persons

Martin Kampel
Rainer Planinc
Melanie Gau

Website

fearless project

…stands for Fear Elimination As Resolution for Loosing Elderly’s Substantial Sorrows, a project designed to detect a wide range of risks with a single sensor unit, enhancing mobility and enabling elderly to take active part in the self-serve society by reducing their fears. Another main focus of this project is the lack of expertise at the supplier side and thus the integration of important parts of the supply chain (i.e. network of electricians and electric shops). To ensure the concentration on the end users needs and wishes, this project is based on research within the Austrian AAL project MuBisA (www.cogvis.at/mubisa) by which it was possible to gain some experience and feedback from end users, thus improving the quality of the system concept tremendously.

FEARLESS will utilize the flexibility of vision based sensors and combine it with acoustic event detection. This combination will significantly enhance the reliability of the overall system. The potential dangers, which can be detected with FEARLESS include smoke/fire, flooding, falls or sudden changes in daily life caused by a deterioration of the health condition. The overall aim of this project is the reduction of barriers (i.e. fears and concerns), which impedes the mobility of elderly people, often suffering from dementia or light loss of cognitive activities.

To ensure the overall project success, the following objectives need to be considered throughout the project:

  • Consider the end user’s fears. If these fears are reduced, elderly will be more willing to take active part in the self-serve society and due to their higher self-efficacy, their mobility will be increased tremendously. Due to the rapid ICT development in the last years, systems to provide comprehensive safety at home are now feasible.
  • The need for self-efficacy asks for a minimal intrusive technology that will not be noticed by other persons (like visitors) and will not interfere with ADL.
  • Ethical and legal issues have to be considered. Local laws on privacy and the European Directive on the Privacy of data (95/46/EC) have to be taken into account.
  • Due to long cycles of innovation in the field of building services engineering, many existing technologies are still not established yet. Thus our focus does not lie on installing FEARLESS into new buildings, but on the backfitting into existing houses/flats – no matter how old they are.
  • The straightforward integration of an ambient assisted technology in already existing buildings/houses/flats is essential. There is no need for opening up the wall, as FEARLESS can be easily installed without installing a huge amount of sensors, as everything is integrated into one single sensor unit.
  • Widely dissemination can only be achieved, if the users and vendors are aware of this technology and the installation of such a system does not require highly specialized companies. The cooperation with electricians facilitates to accomplish this objective.
  • The environment of elderly may change by time, as their daily routines may do as well (e.g. by dementia) – hence, the system has to adapt to new end user needs. FEARLESS is flexible to adapt to new needs for detecting risks (e.g. falls) or behavioural changes (e.g. during their daily routines).
  • An AAL security system has to work autonomously, as people may not be able to report an incident on their own (depending on the incident). A system which visually and acoustically detects and identifies risks is able to cope with different incidents in a correct manner.
  • An ambient assisted living system has to be affordable. To address these needs, FEARLESS is made of standard low-cost components to facilitate a low-cost system which is affordable for everyone.

This project will be performed in cooperation with:

Website: fearless project