Sensor-driven agenda for intelligent home care of the elderly

The exponential increase of home-bound persons who live alone and are in need of continuous monitoring requires new solutions to current problems. Most of these cases present illnesses such as motor or psychological disabilities that deprive of a normal living. Common events such as forgetfulness or falls are quite common and have to be prevented or dealt with. This paper introduces a platform to guide and assist these persons (mostly elderly people) by providing multisensory monitoring and intelligent assistance. The platform operates at three levels. The lower level, denominated ‘‘Data acquisition and processing’’performs the usual tasks of a monitoring system, collecting and processing data from the sensors for the purpose of detecting and tracking humans. The aim is to identify their activities in an intermediate level called ‘‘activity detection’’. The upper level, ‘‘Scheduling and decision-making’’, consists of a scheduler which provides warnings, schedules events in an intelligent manner and serves as an interface to the rest of the platform. The idea is to use mobile and static sensors performing constant monitoring of the user and his/her environment, providing a safe environment and an immediate response to severe problems. A case study on elderly fall detection in a nursery home bedroom demonstrates the usefulness of the proposal.

Organizational and accounting change within the context of the environmental agenda: evidence from Portugal

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of organizational change undergone by a large Portuguese business group within the context of the environmental agenda and the role of accounting as a mechanism for change. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports the results of a case study conducted between 2006 and 2009. Information was obtained from semi-structured interviews and secondary sources. Organizational changes were analyzed using Laughlin’s model in order to identify which category reflected most of the changes introduced to address environmental matters. Findings – This paper offers evidence that change is not a homogeneous phenomenon. Additionally, it confirms previous studies’ findings which found that accounting did not play a significant role in the process of organizational change within the context of the environmental agenda. Originality/value – This paper seeks to complement the research in this area by integrating observations from a case study into an existing model of levels of organizational change according to how a Portuguese business group incorporated environmental issues into its processes, policies and corporate culture.