DemaWare2: Integrating sensors, multimedia and semantic analysis for the ambient care of dementia

•Unifying wearable and ambient sensors, offline and real-time processing.•Integrated proprietary sensors, cloud services and complex image analysis.•Activity recognition in real-world scenarios through intelligent semantic fusion.•Addressing the peculiarities of realistic dementia assessment and care scenarios.•Proof-of-concept deployments for assessment, long-term monitoring and intervention.

This paper presents DemaWare2, an Ambient Assisted Living framework to support the care of people with dementia. The framework integrates various sensor modalities, such as ambient, wearable, offline and cloud-based, together with sophisticated, interdisciplinary methods including image, audio and semantic analysis. Fine-grained, atomic events, such as object manipulation, are aggregated into complex activities through semantic fusion. Applications tailored to monitoring dementia symptoms support clinicians to drive effective, timely interventions and evaluate their outcomes. The framework was evaluated for its robustness, reliability and clinical value in real-world lab trials and home installations.