SenseCare has the primary aim of enhancing and advancing future healthcare processes and systems using sensory and machine learning technologies to provide emotional (affective) and cognitive insights into patient’s well-being so as to provide them with more effective treatment across multiple medical domains. The specific focus is to develop technologies and methods that will lessen the enormous and growing health care costs of dementia and related cognitive impairments that burden European citizens. Dementia is a hugely challenging social issue. People who develop dementia, as well as their carers, face a significantly stressful, even traumatic future. Creating new practices that support them is essential in future health services, and, given the scale of the challenge, technology will need to play a significant role. Affective computing, though still an emerging technology, should be explored for its potential in this context and SenseCare has taken on the role of building a body of know-how to enable this.
More specifically SenseCare had the following overall Objectives:
• Development of the SenseCare affective computing operating system platform as an extensible multi-layered architecture based on open standards.
• Develop, test and deploy various prototype software modules in the SenseCare software platform.
• Specify and enforce security, legal and ethical guidelines in relation to the deployment and use of SenseCare powered applications in the healthcare field.
• Implement selected use cases as test pilots for the dementia care and connected health domain using the SenseCare platform.
• Trial, test and evaluate feedback on the SenseCare above test pilots with patients, care givers and healthcare professionals.
In terms of outputs to date, SenseCare has:
• developed a SenseCare architecture and platform design, with prototyped elements.
• created a portal to host a repository of affective computing knowledge.
• built a strong culture of research, led by the secondees.
• built several use cases upon the architectural design and will use this to engage with a range of healthcare professionals.
• successful engagement with key stakeholders, people with dementia and their carers
• developed a significant framework for development of prototype solutions.
• developed approaches to apply this and develop new tools, built upon the platform design, that support the development of new computing practices.
The SenseCare consortium is: Cork Institute of Technology [CIT], University of Ulster [Ulster], Forschungsinstitut für Telekommunikation [FTK], GLOBIT and INMARK
