Designing a context-aware assistive infrastructure for elderly care

Abstract

We present an assistive healthcare platform, CARE, which aims to provide daily support for elderly caregivers with context-aware, unobtrusive, and actionable information. This information is collected through a plethora of IoT sensors installed strategically at an elderly care centre and is accessed through an Android tablet application. The application's goal is to empower nurses with a better understanding of elderly needs and ultimately, improve the care service. We investigate how IoT devices and sensors can enable a pervasive healthcare system, and discuss a wide-range of important parameters for integration of elderly care practices.

Proposal for Pervasive Elderly Care: A Case Study with Next of Kin

“…There are many kinds of sensors on the market that can improve people's lives. There are sensors both inside the body and wearables but also set in the environment (Klakegg et al, 2017). In Comfort, sensor information could facilitate communication between the patient and the nursing staff, as well as between relatives and caregivers.…”

“…Family members should also be offered an opportunity to ask questions about the elderly from the nursing staff. Intelligent systems allow information sharing between several stakeholders, such as medical staff and nursing staff (Freitas et al, 2015;Klakegg et al, 2017). Our study proposes that the means of pervasive systems are used to inform family members about the status of the elderly.…”

“…The devices provide intelligent technology for surveillance of the elderly in housing security, comfort and automation (Wong et al, 2017). Current knowledge and technology already enable pervasive systems (Medjahed et al, 2011;Faertes, 2015;Klakegg et al, 2017). Healthcare mobile devices enable more efficient patient care, and sensors can be used to allow collecting and evaluating physiological data from the elderly (Cavallari et al, 2014).…”

“…Safe housing has been studied previously, in a case where an intelligent control environment was built in the home of elderly persons. Such technology was placed in each room of the home to monitor the movement of users in the rooms and, if necessary, an alarm can be triggered remotely (Freitas et al, 2015;Klakegg et al, 2017).…”

“…Automatically collected data gathers valuable information about their behaviour and potentially their needs to enable prompt decisions and plans for future actions. Devices exported to the home of the elderly should not compromise patient safety and therefore must be as discreet as possible and work under everyday living conditions (Klakegg et al, 2017;Nygård & Starkhammar, 2007). Figure 1 illustrates how data can flow between several actors, such as care personnel in the sheltered accommodation and next of kin at their homes who are involved in the communication related to elderly persons' health-related data (Klakegg et al, 2017).…”