MAKING E-MOBILITY SUITABLE FOR ELDERLY

Regular physical exercises seem to be one of most important habit for living a healthy and joyful life. No matter what the age is, physical activity offers a general framework for an improved handling of human needs, starting with the basic ones such as physiological and safety and ending with the higher one such as belonging, esteem and self-actualization. Despite of this, the higher the age is, the lower the availability for physical exercises become. Health issues, general lack of energy or social conformism are some of the most frequent reasons for such behavior. Moreover, these factors act like a negative feed-back mechanism conducting to chronic inactivity. That is why maintaining a high level of physical activity even at a high age become a priority. In this article we present PAT - Physical Activity Trainer, a module projected to be included in Mobile@Old - an integrated platform for assisting elderly people to maintain a healthy lifestyle in their homes. One of the primary goals is to act as non-intrusively as possible while relying on modern technologies that will insure its effectiveness. Mobile@Old will take an interdisciplinary approach making use of several novel techniques in artificial intelligence, image analysis, facial expression recognition, data fusion, knowledge extraction and agents cooperation. PAT is presented from both psychological and technological point of view. The interface between kineto-therapist and old people is based on Kinect impersonal silhouettes. Real examples of recorded exercises are also presented. Moreover, we explain the interactions amongst PAT and the other components of Mobile@Old platform.