Perception of human activities: A means to support connectedness between the elderly and their caregivers

This position paper describes a smart-phone based activity recognition system for improving social connectedness between caregivers and their elderly relatives. Sensing technologies can enable real-time monitoring to provide activity recognition in order to support health and safety among the elderly who are living independently. However, most existing activity recognition systems are focused on using sensors for unidirectional monitoring of emergency cases in particular, fall detection. Motivated by the desire to utilize bidirectional activity recognition to improve connectedness between an ageing population and their caregivers, we describe our planned approach to investigate how the perception of a caregiver's activities by a senior citizen and vice versa can aid in improving social connectedness. To investigate this perception, activity states will be transformed into an information visualization into the caregiver's home and vice versa without overt communication from participants. Findings are expected to provide further insight on the extent to which perception of human activities increase social connectedness.