Research Smart home with healthcare for the elderly - adrienerice/The_Chosen_Ones GitHub Wiki

Define the domain

Today with the development of healthcare technology, there is a significant improvement in public health, personal health, medical equipment, and medicine. Due to the popularization and convenience of medical treatment, an increasing number of people gets better medical benefits and has longer life. However, population growth, especially the increase in aging, has added a lot of burden to medical care and the elderly might not get adequate medical assistance. So facing this grim status quo, it is crucial that publics should pay attention to the welfare, medical and social demands of the elderly. With the increasing age and decreasing physical performance, older people should concern more about their health in everyday life. In that case, developing remote healthcare monitoring is an efficient and effective way for the welfare of the elderly, so people can continue to live at home instead of in expensive and limited nursing homes or hospitals. The smart home is intended to improve older people’s independence in their own home by functioning as an assisted and monitoring tool. After the assistance of hardware and software of smart home, the elderlies are able to carry out daily activities with less assistance by others. With connection of IT network and ICT prototype, remote monitoring system in my design is applied by smart home technology to collect and analyse user’s data. If necessary, this ICT based remote monitoring system allows doctors to monitor important vital signs in real time with less effort and less cost. It will also increase the elderly’s independence, life quality, medical care quality, and self-efficiency.

Critique the paper

Stinne Aaløkke Ballegaard, Thomas Riisgaard Hansen, and Morten Kyng. 2008. ‘Healthcare in everyday life: designing healthcare services for daily life’. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1807–1816. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357336

Abstract: “Today the design of most healthcare technology is driven by the considerations of healthcare professionals and technology companies. This has several benefits, but we argue that there is a need for a supplementary design approach on the basis the citizen and his or her everyday life. An approach where the main focus is to develop healthcare technology that fits the routines of daily life and thus allows the citizens to continue with the activities they like and have grown used to – also with an aging body or when managing a chronic condition. Thus, with this approach it is not just a matter of fixing a health condition, more importantly is the matter of sustaining everyday life as a whole. This argument is a result from our work – using participatory design methods – on the development of supportive healthcare technology for elderly people and for diabetic, pregnant women.”

Critique: This paper identifies the significant importance of applying healthcare technology to publics especially for the elderly, pregnant women, and diabetes. So, building a useful and efficient healthcare technology for the elderly as a domain has certain research value. It also held several seminars with different stakeholders to design an effective remote medicine. In order to enrich the resources and come up with the approach, it is crucial to receive different voices from professionals and users, who are clinicians, homecare workers, IT companies, older people and their families. The more related information that I received, the more I understand user’s needs and issues. So, I can focus on where creation and innovation are urgently needed, decide which parts are essential to develop and deal with, and apply a new remote monitoring technology in the daily life of the elderly based on ICT model and sufficient field study and experiments. In this study, the elderly should measure and collect their own vital data and send them to local health centre, which requires the elderly have some knowledge of technology to use the tool and send the health data. The barrier of using remote technology should try to avoid and clinicians should receive the data automatically in real time. Healthcare technology plays an important role, because it is more than just providing information to clinicians to determine eligibility for treatment. It also supports cooperation between healthcare professionals and publics and enables them to take appropriate action based on the information provided to professionals.

Bethany Kon, Alex Lam, and Jonathan Chan. 2017. ‘Evolution of Smart Homes for the Elderly’. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE, 1095–1101. https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3054928

Abstract: “Smart home technology provides benefits for the elderly in six primary categories: safety, health and nutrition, physical activity, personal hygiene and care, social engagement, and leisure. Safety is about detecting and mitigating, if not removing, hazards from the user’s environment. Social engagement relates to the smart home functions that allow the elderly to combat social isolation, such as by connecting the elderly with friends and family. Leisure activities are about how a smart home can allow users to spend their free time. Physical Activity relates to the concept of movement from the user, such as having them engage in non-sedentary activities. Nutrition and Health is related to the monitoring of a user’s state of health. Personal hygiene and care encompasses the ways that a smart home can improve the user’s well-being and assist in his/her daily activities. This workshop paper will present existing technologies in the aforementioned fields and highlight areas where development is lacking. In addition, an evaluation on past smart home designs is conducted to determine whether they fulfill the six proposed primary categories.”

Critique: This paper illustrates that smart home technology benefits the elderly’s life in many aspects especially in personal hygiene and health care. The smart home is intended to strengthen the independence of older people in their own home by acting as an assistance and monitoring instrument. With the help of smart home hardware and software, the elderly is able to carry out everyday activities with less assistance from others. So, by connecting the IT network and the ICT prototype, the remote monitoring system in my design is used by the smart home technology to collect and analyse user data. By increasing the awareness of smart home, it is significant to perform more personalised functions for individuals and create an efficient, effective, user-friendly and multifunctional smart home tool based on the elderly’s social and medical needs. This paper also mentions about the special assistance for disabled, which provides an idea that the designed technology should concern about the disabled elderly, for example the blind, so the system should receive instructions from users and take responses to users as voice control and touchable device. The device could have physical feedback by different signals so that the elderly can easily understand and learn its meaning. A beautiful imagination is that there is not only one device but a set of smart home system applying in the elderly’s home. In that case, tracking their health status in real time and analysing data systematically will provide better advice to their health. However, the privacy is an issue that should be discussed by the elderly and their families.

Zoraida Callejas and Ramón López-Cózar. 2009. ‘Designing smart home interfaces for the elderly’. ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and ComputingIssue 95 September 2009 pp 10–16 https://doi.org/10.1145/1651259.1651261

Abstract: “In this paper we highlight the importance of tailoring the design of dialogue systems to the targeted user group. We propose a human-centered design cycle and report the results from a survey conducted among the intended users of a smart home for the elderly.”

Critique: This paper shows the research of human-centred design smart home system for the elderly. In order to facilitate the interaction of these users, it is necessary to lay the foundation for the conception and development of an omnipresent multimodal dialogue system that supports them in their daily activities at home. In the effort to promote integration and accessibility initiatives, these new technologies will enable the elderly to interact with smart homes, especially people who may have difficulty using these new technologies due to disability. An essential aspect of smart home’s interface design is the emphasis on usability. Designing and implementing the system with user’s preference and technical requirements is necessary to perform a user-centred design. It also mentions about Wizard of Oz (WOZ) technique which corporates designs in each stage in iterative ways. During the case study, it analysed that the all the functional restrictions of system should have a characteristic called non-intrusive, which means that the system should not bother the elderly’s daily life unless it appears some necessary conditions. After summarizing users’ experience, it provides a good sight that the elderly focus on the functions for contact and for blinds and winds. However, some older people would be afraid about new technology, and some would rely on technology so that they may lose their living skills soon and may lead to memory loosing.

M. Jamal Deen. 2015. ‘Information and communications technologies for elderly ubiquitous healthcare in a smart home’. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Volume 19 Issue 3-4 July 2015 pp 573 599 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-015-0856-x

Abstract: “Over the past century, in most countries, there has been a continual increase in life expectancy primarily due to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine. However, these improvements are now coupled with aging population demographics and falling birth rates, which, when combined, are expected to significantly burden the socioeconomic well-being of many of these countries. In fact, never before in human history have we been confronted with such a large aging population, nor have we developed solid, cost-effective solutions for the well-being, healthcare and social needs of the elderly. One efficient and cost-effective solution to the problem of elderly/patient care is remote healthcare monitoring so they can continue to live at home rather than in nursing homes or hospitals that are very expensive and with limited spaces. These remote monitoring systems will allow medical personnel to keep track of important physiological signs with reduced human resources, at less cost and in real time. This paper introduces several low-cost, noninvasive, user-friendly sensing and actuating systems using information and communication technologies. Such systems can be used to create engineering solutions to some of the pressing healthcare problems in our society, especially as it pertains to the elderly. One example is the integration of sensors, wireless communications, low-power electronics and intelligent computing to determine health-related information using signals from walking patterns. Such a sensing system will be suitable for prolonged use in a home environment. It will be wearable, noninvasive and non-intrusive, similar to smart socks, smart wrist-bands or smart belts. Other examples such as a smart joint monitor and a smart sleeping environment will be discussed, and future perspectives and research challenges in smart home technologies will be described.”

Critique: This article describes several inexpensive, non-invasive, and user-friendly transmission and detection systems for the elderly that use information and communication technologies. Improving the home environment using the same ubiquitous and inexpensive technology that has advanced in the information and communication age is a promising solution for ensuring the sustainability of today's health care systems. The useful technology to ubiquitous health care is using information and communication technologies (ICT). So, connecting with smart home, ICT can be applied to develop a smart medical home for older people. This ubiquitous Healthcare takes cares of users and is able to communicate with contacts in emergency situations. It is also important to detect symptoms of illnesses at an early stage and deliver appropriate actions in the direction of a healthier life immediately. Also, wearable device is recommended to monitor the activities and motions of the older people. And by sending notification with vibrating and sounding from wearable device, users can get immediate alerts from current activities. This paper also mentions that smart joint monitoring methods can be applied to provide quantitative assessment of missing, so evaluating health data and self-checking would be more organized with less errors and accidents. This personalized smart home is more comfortable and convenient, because ICT will collect, analyse and conduct an intelligent network of all the device to monitor clearer healthcare and provide better services.

Jan-Willem van 't Klooster, Catherine Combes, and Bert-Jan van Beijnum. 2012. ‘Towards decision support for a home care services platform’. WI&C '12: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Web Intelligence & Communities. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 7, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/2189736.2189747

Abstract: “It is believed that ICT-mediation for home care services increases patient empowerment, independency, self-efficacy and quality of life. Providing elderly people with tailored care services allows us to learn from patient data to predict future care needs. In this article, we demonstrate the contribution of machine learning to homecare services, using data collected by a home care services platform. As an actual case, we show how simulated medication compliance can be measured and modeled using clustering and regression techniques. The approach is validated using data from French nursing home databases. The results show that it is possible to classify situations in elderly healthcare, and schedule resource planning according to expected health problems.”

Critique: This paper argues that providing personalized care for seniors allows developers to learn from patient previous data and to predict future health care remands. Based on the machine learning technology to smart home system, clustering and regression might be used to measure and model the future health status and treatment. The design of approached are useful as they are designed as analysing requirements, developing model, simulating data, clustering data, forecasting data, and presenting results. This article informs that different data mining techniques are suitable for different kinds of approaches in providing future suggestions for the elderly. And after applying continuous data mining of frequent user resources, it is feasible for me to find the pattern of the older people and predict daily treatment. The novel clustering method is also applied to simulate data to present the results of clustering, prediction, and pattern detection in an intelligent networked environment to support decision-making by physicians. It could be used as ICT based smart home care services to increase the elderly’s independence, life quality, medical care quality, and self-efficiency. However, when stakeholders use this system to analyse the health care of the older people, they should be aware that all the use of systems will be recorded for individual monitoring, which does not protect stakeholders’ privacy and security well. But it helps to protect the health of the elderly as all their related health information is presented to clinicians and system will react to emergency as soon as possible.