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Speaker: Professor Sylvain Giroux, University of Sherbrooke, Canada

Title: "Empowering Autonomy at Home: DIY Cognitive Assistance in Smart Homes"

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Abstract: Since 2001, the DOMUS Laboratory has been developing cognitive orthotics and telemonitoring systems to support aging in place. Using off-the-shelf sensors, these systems collect and analyze data to provide meaningful feedback to older adults, caregivers, and clinicians. Successfully deployed in real homes and care residences, they enhance autonomy for vulnerable seniors and individuals with cognitive impairments. Their success stems from integrating living labs, participatory design, and interdisciplinary collaboration, ensuring relevant user-centered solutions. However, the diversity of users and living environments requires flexible, tailored implementation and assistance strategies. Though all our project we experienced that smart-home technologies are often complex, time-consuming, and expert-dependent, requiring expertise in computer science, healthcare, and caregiving—a combination that is rarely accessible in one place at the same time. To overcome this challenge, we are developing a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, empowering non-experts to create and customize their own assistive solutions. By adopting this approach, caregivers and even individuals with cognitive impairments can actively shape more adaptive, effective, and personalized environments. The resulting DIY platform leverages IoT, ontologies, activity recognition, and augmented reality to create intuitive, customizable smart-home solutions. This presentation highlights three cognitive orthotics developed at DOMUS Lab, demonstrating their applications in daily activity monitoring, meal preparation, and nighttime support. Using these as case studies, we outline the core components of our DIY approach to Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and explore key challenges such as usability, interdisciplinary integration (technology, health, and design), and system adoption within healthcare networks and society.

Speaker's Short Bio: Sylvain Giroux is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sherbrooke, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Montreal in 1993. With a professional background spanning both academic institutions and private industry, Sylvain Giroux has made significant contributions to the development of information systems across diverse transdisciplinary domains, including distance learning, geophysics, e-commerce, telemedicine, task-support systems, cognitive assistance, and smart homes.
His current research interests focus on cognitive assistance, telemonitoring, smart homes, the Internet of Things (IoT), activity recognition, augmented reality, and cryptocurrencies. Sylvain Giroux is also the co-founder of DOMUS, an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the University of Sherbrooke (http://domus.usherbrooke.ca). DOMUS has a strong track record in leveraging participatory design, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, and living labs to develop, explore, and evaluate innovative solutions for cognitive assistance. Its mission is to foster autonomy for individuals living with Dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairments, or traumatic brain injuries.
 

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