HELICOPTER is intended to support end-users and their caregivers with feedback, advice and motivation by analysing the health of the end users. This will be done by the continuous monitoring of their behaviours as well as of their medical status in a simple, unobtrusive way by means of ambient intelligence. To accomplish its purpose, the system will acquire data coming from a heterogeneous set of devices. Besides the devices customarily adopted to check basic health parameters, environmental and wearable sensors will be used, and daily actuions and behaviours will be assessed both in terms of quality and of quantity.
Behavioural analysis techniques will be implemented and an interpretative model will be worked out, both exploiting “a priori” medical knowledge and accounting for the system’s “self-training”. The evaluation of the health-quality of the inferred activity pattern will enable several services aimed directly at the user (warning, encouragement, motivation) or at the caregiver (alarms, reports). Eventually, this will make the health monitoring routine much less boring and demanding. The indirect monitoring through ambient intelligence is likely to lead to reducing the frequency of clinical parameter checks. It is worth pointing out that the HELICOPTER system will mostly use technology primarily conceived for different applications: environmental sensors, for instance, are used for environmental control and safety checks.HELICOPTER will complement other services supporting independent living, providing an innovative way of exploiting a wealth of information already available for different purposes.
For the same reason, (the HELICOPTER system being largely based on existing technology) it is expected that no major obstacles can threaten the potential market of the HELICOPTER services within a relatively short timeframe from the project end (tentatively 1-2 years for product engineering and marketing).
