Smart monitoring of seniors behavioural patterns and more specifically activities of daily living have attracted immense research interest in recent years. Development of smart decision support systems to support the promotion of health smart homes has also emerged taking advantage of the plethora of smart, inexpensive and unobtrusive monitoring sensors, devices and software tools. To this end, a smart monitoring system has been used in order to extract meaningful information about television (TV) usage patterns and subsequently associate them with clinical findings of experts. The smart TV operating state remote monitoring system was installed in four elderly women homes and gathered data for more than 11 months. Results suggest that TV daily usage (time the TV is turned on) can predict mental health change. Conclusively, the authors suggest that collection of smart device usage patterns could strengthen the inference capabilities of existing health DSSs applied in uncontrolled settings such as real senior homes.
Keywords: TV usage patterns; behavioural patterns; daily living activities; decision support systems; geriatrics; health smart homes; home computing; inexpensive monitoring sensors; medical expert systems; mental health change; patient monitoring; remote monitoring system; smart decision support systems; smart monitoring sensors; smart monitoring system; software tools; ubiquitous computing; unobtrusive monitoring sensors.