Keele Research Repository

Dementia results in much stress in senior citizens and and immensely affects their quality of life. It also incurs huge financial and emotional burdens to their family members. Personal information assistance may alleviate such a problem by enhancing the sufferers’ ability to perceive the environment, understand their personal status, and make judgments and decisions. Leveraging on visual intelligence technologies, we develop a wearable system that provides personal assistance to enhance the independence and well-being of elderly people with dementia. An application called MedHelp was developed on Google Glass paired with a mobile phone to improve medication compliance. MedHelp has three functions: it sends out reminders to a user who is on regular medication; it helps a user to recognize the correct medicine container and provides dosing instructions; and it tracks the user’s medicine-taking activities so as to plan the time of next medications.