Pervasive sensing for social connectedness

Global population ageing is an emerging challenge of the twenty-first century. In an era of pervasive computing (i.e. the proliferation of ever-present smart devices), governments, companies, and academic institutions are working together to develop and promote cutting-edge initiatives that sustain the quality of life and address the complexities and opportunities of an ageing world. In this chapter, we propose a user-centred approach within a multidisciplinary framework, which incorporates human-computer interaction, social science, signal processing, and pervasive computing, to inspire the design of a bidirectional context-aware system to support social connectedness between the elderly and their caregivers. Following a review of previous works on socio-technical awareness systems and human activity recognition models, we describe our user-driven methodological approach and demonstrate the value and potential benefits of bidirectional activity-based peripheral systems within ambient assisted living environments