Living Function-Resilient Society in the Centenarian Era: Living Safety Technology Based on Connective, Artificial Intelligence

In the centenarian era, it has become even more imperative to address the physical and cognitive changes faced by children, the elderly, and disabled persons. We need a “living function resilient society,” which ensures they enjoy safe living environments in ways that allow them to maintain active social participation levels despite the changes. To build such a society, more attention should be paid to problems: diversity in life function and intervention needs, gap between efficacy and effectiveness, fragmentation of living data and support service and variety in privacy exposure. To deal with these issues, this chapter describes a new approach referred to as “connective AI” that allows individual lives to be connected with each other and efficacy to be scaled to effectiveness by computerizing places of living in accordance with the private policy of individual facilities and connecting them with each other through a network. As a concrete example of connective AI, this chapter introduces smart living labs that are developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in cooperation with children’s hospitals, rehabilitation hospitals, intensive care homes for the elderly, and private homes.