Virtual living room system based on video call toconnect nursing home resident and family moderately
Genki Uryu

Kenji Funahashi

Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japang.uryu.880@stn.nitech.ac.jp

Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japankenji@nitech.ac.jp

Index Terms—Virtual living room, Video call, BLE beacon

I. I NTRODUCTION
Many senior citizens stay in a hospital or nursing home.
When they part with their family, there is a risk of themsuffering from delirium due to stress [1][2]. Although video
call probably reduces their stress, they may feel an oppressive
feeling by constant video call, and also may be hesitant totake the trouble to call each time. The family live freely andhave no strong connection with the other in the living room,
but a person can start a conversation at any time by talking
to another person, and the conversation will end naturally
without clear termination signal. In this paper, we propose
virtual living room system to connect distant people eachother moderately using video call service. It provides only
information that the other person is there when video call is
disconnected, and connects video call by a belief voice word.
II. V IRTUAL LIVING ROOM SYSTEM
In the living room, you can see at a glance whether familyis there. A person needs to be able to know whether the otheris there when using virtual living room system. BLE Beaconsthat are been worn by them are used to judge whether theyare. Video call is activated by voice recognition of a beliefword and closed when they stay silent each other. Skype isused as a subsystem instead of developing original video callsystem. One main system sends the necessary information tothe other system through Skype text chat function. And thesystem displays the status of the other on the half of the screen(Fig. 1).

Fig. 2. Video call during an experimentIII. E XPERIMENT
Subjects had a video call while staying home for longtime ﬁrst, it meant plain Skype was used and it was beenconnected all along. After that they used our new system, andcompared these two lifestyles (Fig. 2). They all said that theyfelt uncomfortable for ﬁrst one, and that the system reduced
the uncomfortable feeling. It was conﬁrmed that the system
reproduced the atmosphere of natural living room to a certaindegree.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed virtual living room system toconnect distant people each other moderately using video call.
An experimental system was built and it could reproduce
relationship at natural living room. As a future work, we would
like to estimate person’s action from Beacon information, anddo not show only whether the other is there, but show also
what and where they do.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI Grant
Number JP20K11918.
R EFERENCES

Fig. 1. System screen and appearance of experiment[1] A. Matui, M. Yatsuzuka, S. Takabatake, Y. Mukaiyama, K. Hasegawa,
and K. Tazawa, “Study on the delirium-inducing factors after operationin aged surgical patient,” The journal of the Nursing Society of theToyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, vol. 6. no. 1. Japan,July 2005.
[2] American Psychiatric Association, “American Psychiatric Association
Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients With Delirium,” 1999.