Wandering is a common behavior among people with dementia (PwD). It is also one of the main concerns of caregivers since it can cause the person to get lost and injured. The frequency and manner in which a person wanders is highly influenced by the person's background and contextual factors specific to the situation. In this project we are investigating some of the properties of wandering behaviours, particularly related to our ability to sense them with mobile devices. We have proposed a novel decision-theoretic model that estimates the risk faced by the PwD and decides on the appropriate action to take, such as prompting the PwD or calling the caregiver. The model can be tailored to the user needs (e.g. known locations, level of cognitive decline) and takes into account uncertainty, and contextual information gathered from sensors, such as current location, noise, and proximity to the caregiver. A preliminary version of the system has been instantiated in a wandering assistance application for mobile devices running on an Android platform.

• Jesse Hoey
• Jesus Favela

More details can be found by reading the following papers:

• Jesse Hoey, Xiao Yang, Eduardo Quintana and Jesus Favela LaCasa: Location And Context-Aware Safety Assistant. Proc. International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, San Diego, May, 2012 (bibtex)
• Jesse Hoey, Xiao Yang and Jesus Favela Decision theoretic, context aware safetyassistance for persons who wander. International Workshop on Ubiquitous Health and Wellness, Newcastle, UK, 2012 (bibtex)
• Marcela Rodriguez, Rene Navarro, Jesus Favela and Jesse Hoey An Ontological Representation Model to Tailor Ambient Assisted Interventions for Wandering. AAAI Fall Symposium on AI for Gerontechnology, Arlington, VA, 2012 (bibtex)
• Jesse Hoey, Xiao Yang, Marek Grzes, Rene Navarro and Jesus Favela Modeling and Learning for LaCasa, the Location And Context-Aware Safety Assistant. NIPS 2012 Workshop on Machine Learning Approaches to Mobile Context Awareness‎ , Lake Tahoe, NV, 2012 (bibtex)

American Alzheimer's Association through the Everyday Technology for Alzheimers Care (ETAC) program, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada.