I'M-ACTIVE : Intelligent Multimodal Assessment and Coaching Through Identification of Vulnerabilities in older pEople

衰老与合并症、身体功能不佳和认知能力下降的风险增加有关，在大多数情况下，这会导致虚弱。身体虚弱的老年人需要长期住院和增加社会护理的可能性是前者的两倍。积极的生活方式可以显著降低虚弱的风险，但与年龄相关的身体和认知能力下降往往限制了从事有目的的活动/锻炼的动机和能力。鼓励虚弱的老年人利用个性化的反馈和提示每天积极活动是极其困难的，这往往是因为提供治疗支持的工作人员有限，而且缺乏对他们日常活动的客观衡量，以鼓励他们保持活跃和锻炼。最近的研究表明，智能机器人技术可以为老年人提供独立离开的服务，促进积极健康的生活方式，并支持对老年人的社会关怀。然而，用于社会护理的机器人解决方案目前的采用率和成熟度有限，主要是因为“技术推动”方法，即在研发过程中推动新设备和机器人平台，而不考虑它是否满足用户的愿望和需求。“技术推动”的结果是，技术没有被大多数用户采用，或者没有达到预期的效果。与过去的类似项目不同，I-ACTIVE项目将遵循负责任的研究和创新(RRI)方法，强烈关注定期的患者和人员的参与和参与，从头到尾都以人为核心。机器智能和医疗保健传感器技术的研究将从一开始就由利益相关者和用户指导，以创建一个用户友好的平台，专门为有虚弱风险的老年人提供帮助。该平台将为老年人量身定做，以克服认知和身体障碍，提高这些新技术在这一人群中的接受度和使用率。此外，该计划亦会举办公开活动，以提高公众对使用机器人和自主系统在社会照顾方面的益处和局限性的认识。具体而言，该计划将研究设计一种智能综合系统，为长者提供持续的度身订造的支援，以达致和维持积极健康的生活方式。该系统智能地将来自可穿戴和可接近传感器的信息与负担得起的社交机器人的友好多模式交互(视听、运动、手势和触摸)融合在一起，以评估用户在家中的身体和认知功能。此外，该系统可为从业者和护理者提供客观和全面的用户脆弱状况评估，为个性化的质量护理提供信息。预期的主要创新包括：客观评估基于家庭的功能参数，以支持老年人脆弱风险的自我管理；在同一仪器中监测身体、认知和社会维度，结合用户对数据收集和共享的偏好。对有脆弱风险的老年人进行的可行性研究将验证原型在现实场景中的可接受性和可用性，并收集关于机器人平台如何吸引用户获得并保持积极和成功的健康生活方式的证据。在该项目中获得的结果和经验将为后续多学科研究和技术开发提供信息，以将I‘m-Active系统整合到医疗保健中，特别是提高英国全科医疗的效果和效率，即管理与社区老年人复杂需求相关的人口健康。

Ageing is associated with an increased risk of comorbidities, poor physical functions, and cognitive decline, which in most cases leads to frailty. Frail older adults are twice as likely to need long-term hospitalisation and increased social care provision.An active lifestyle can significantly reduce the risk of frailty, but the age-related physical and cognitive decline often limits motivation and ability to engage in purposeful activities/exercise. Encouraging frail older adults to be active daily using personalised feedback and prompts is extremely difficult, often because there is limited staff availability for therapeutic support and a lack of objective measurement of their daily activities to encourage them to keep being active and exercising. Recent research that has shown that intelligent robotic technologies can provide services for independent leaving to older people, promote active and healthy lifestyle, and support social caring of older people. However, adoption and maturity of robotics solutions for social care is currently limited, mostly because of the "technology push" approach, i.e. new devices and robotic platforms are pushed through research and development without considering whether or not it satisfies users' aspirations and needs. The result of the "technology push" is that technologies are not adopted by most of the users or do not achieve the intended impact.Unlike similar past projects, the I'M-ACTIVE project will follow a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach with a strong focus on regular patient and people involvement and engagement that will put people at the core from the beginning to the end. Research in machine intelligence and healthcare sensor technologies will be guided from the beginning by stakeholders and users to create a user-friendly platform specifically designed to offer assistance to older adults at risk of frailty. The platform will be tailored to older adults needs to overcome the cognitive and physical barriers to increase acceptability and use of these new technologies among this population. Also, open events will be organised to increase the public awareness of benefits and limitations of the use of robotics and autonomous systems in social care.Specifically, the project will study the design of a smart integrated system that can provide continuous tailored support to older adults to achieve and maintain an active and healthy lifestyle. The system intelligently merges information from wearable and nearable sensors with the friendly multimodal interaction (audio-visual, movement, gesture, and touch) of an affordable social robot to assess the physical and cognitive functions of the user at home. Furthermore, the system can provide an objective and comprehensive assessment on the user frailty status to practitioners and carers to inform personalised quality care.The main innovations expected are: the objective assessment of home-based functional parameters to support self-management of the risk of frailty in older adults; the monitoring of physical, cognitive and social dimensions within the same instrument, combined with user preferences on data collection and sharing.A feasibility study with older adults at risk of frailty will validate the acceptability and usability of the prototype in realistic scenarios and gather evidence on how a robotic platform can solicit users to obtain and maintain an active and successful healthy lifestyle.The results and experience gained in this project will inform follow-up multidisciplinary research and technical development toward the integration of the I'M-ACTIVE system into the healthcare and specially to increase efficacy and efficiency of general practice in the UK, i.e. managing population health related to complex needs with older people in the community.