Privacy Protection in Ubiquitous Computing for Elderly in-Home Assistance Applications

With the rapid increase of aging population in some countries, some specific research areas in gerontechnology attract more and more concern of scientists, such as independent living, health care and home health care, caregiver support and so on. It is the life objective for most elderly people to get good health, full social participation, and independent living throughout the entire life span, as long as it may extend.

In the field of elderly in-home assistance applications, we studied the solutions for the combination of different wireless technologies indoors. Our works include:

1. to develop multi-hop MAC protocols and routing algorithms to meet the requirements of various kinds of applications.

2. to develop topology control algorithms in mobile UWB/WiFi networks to improve network performance in terms of throughput and bandwidth utilization, especially in order to minimize the overall network cost.

3. to develop smart resource allocation algorithms to enhance QoS and overall network bandwidth utilization.

4. to modify Ns2 platform for the simulations.

As the elderly, like anyone else, accept and adopt technology when it meets their needs and expectations, we should get to know their needs and expectations and make assistant devices provide a sense of safety and security for the elderly. To improve the quality of life of the elderly, privacy protection is another challenge. We have defined a suitable implementation of security based on public key cryptography for indoor environment, which allows the protection of the information end-to-end. We are also trying to use biomarkers added to assistant devices, such as voiceprint. In the future, large scale adoption and diffusion of ubiquitous computing empowered by wearable devices will be considered for a dense wireless network.

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