Supporting daily living activities using behavior logs and Augmented Reality

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a support system for daily living activities based on a user's behavior log in an indoor environment. Generally speaking, daily living activities hardly remain in our memory, so that, determining the order and priority of daily tasks can be difficult. There are studies supporting daily chores based on a behavior log and aiming to improve the work efficiency by using a memory aid. However, most of the existing studies require pre-installation of costly devices such as cameras and sensors, and are limited to supporting a particular task or purpose. There have been proposed many methods based on Augmented Reality (AR) which annotate captured images of the real world with texts, but text-based information may frustrate users. More intuitive user interfaces are required. In this paper, we first propose a user's behavior log management technique which associates each activity log with an object/location in the target indoor space. Then, we propose a method for reproducing AR-based visual effects on the object/location determined based on the log; the method naturally navigates the user to carrying out the intended task. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed method and have conducted subjective surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed visual effects. We thereby, confirmed that the proposed visual effects can make users more intuitively aware of the intended task than the text-based annotation method.