An efficient ambient intelligent–assisted people searching for Internet of Things–based health-care system

Abstract As the life expectancy continues to rise in recent years, our society is facing more and more challenges of elderly well-being and health-care worker shortage. Smart robot is one of the potential solutions to relieve these social problems. A smart robot can work for 24 hours, help human health-care workers in daily tasks, take care of the residents in hospitals or nursing houses for promoting their health, and enable them to take part in the positive social activities. However, in an unstructured environment, designing a long-term autonomous smart robot is particularly challenging. Though the users hold very high expectations on the intelligent android that can understand human intentions and respond properly, a full-functional smart robot is expensive and hard to achieve. There is a trade-off between the contradictory threefold goals of safety, performance, and cost-efficiency during the design. If one of these design goals is approached further, it usually leads to a recession of one or even both of the other goals. In this chapter the ambient intelligence (AmI) technology is applied to optimize all the designing goals simultaneously by shifting the computation complexity away from the local sensor systems on the robots to the external sensors distributed in the workspace. In such a solution the external sensors can provide robots with a wide overview of the environment, and the robot can be adequately prepared to tackle the upcoming tasks. Benefitted to the robotic functionalities embedded and shared within the AmI environment, the system design is simplified, and the system expenses are also decreased. Meanwhile, the system safety is always the top priority; the security mechanisms are crucially important and need more of our attentions when the information is spreading within AmI environment.