Towards a new paradigm for assistive technology at home: research
  challenges, design issues and performance assessment
  Providing elderly and people with special needs, including those suffering
from physical disabilities and chronic diseases, with the possibility of
retaining their independence at best is one of the most important challenges
our society is expected to face. Assistance models based on the home care
paradigm are being adopted rapidly in almost all industrialized and emerging
countries. Such paradigms hypothesize that it is necessary to ensure that the
so-called Activities of Daily Living are correctly and regularly performed by
the assisted person to increase the perception of an improved quality of life.
This chapter describes the computational inference engine at the core of
Arianna, a system able to understand whether an assisted person performs a
given set of ADL and to motivate him/her in performing them through a
speech-mediated motivational dialogue, using a set of nearables to be installed
in an apartment, plus a wearable to be worn or fit in garments.
