Precise process definitions for activities of daily living.

The dramatically increasing population of disabled people and adults who are 65 years old and over will increase financial burdens for assisted living care in the United States and more generally on a global basis. To mitigate these costs, increasing numbers of disabled and elderly people (our clientele) will live alone at home. This paper suggests that the safety of such disabled and elderly people might be increased by using precise process definitions of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) as the basis for guiding and monitoring their activities. We propose to model ADLs using Little-JIL, a language that supports ADL definitions that are distinguished from other ADL definitions in the literature by their use of such features as concurrency, exception handling, reaction control, and channel communication, all of which are important for monitoring ADLs at appropriately low levels of detail. This paper uses making tea, making a sandwich and answering a phone, as example ADLs for process definition. It suggests how a client can be monitored in real-time to detect unsafe ADL performance deviations that may lead to hazards. It also suggests how monitoring histories can be used for automated assessments that can provide care providers/specialists with key information about trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]