Active and Assisted Living Ecosystem for the Elderly

Abstract

A novel ecosystem to promote the physical, emotional and psychic health and well-being of the elderly is presented. Our proposal was designed to add several services developed to meet the needs of the senior population, namely services to improve social inclusion and increase contribution to society. Moreover, the solution monitors the vital signs of elderly individuals, as well as environmental parameters and behavior patterns, in order to seek eminent danger situations and predict potential hazardous issues, acting in accordance with the various alert levels specified for each individual. The platform was tested by seniors in a real scenario. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed ecosystem was well accepted and is easy to use by seniors.

Technological Ecosystems in Care and Assistance: A Systematic Literature Review

“…On the other hand, only five proposals (14%) referred to recreation as one of their main goals, and just two proposals (5%) were focused on facilitating occupation in life to end users. Twenty-six (70%) papers addressed more than one ecosystem goal, and four papers [44,49,56,65] referred to three different goals in the ecosystem. When having more than one goal, almost all proposals combine independent living objectives with health and care related provision, except for [47] which combines recreation and health care provision, and [10,57] which combine independent living and recreation.…”

“…Figure 10 shows the results referring to the maturity of the proposed ecosystem solutions in the selected studies, obtained results show that 46% (17 papers, e.g., [9,47,48,53,63,64], etc.) describe an ecosystem conceptualization or have not been tested, 11% (six papers, [6,7,8,61,62,70]) have been tested either as a whole or any of their components have been piloted in lab conditions, 30% (11 papers, [44,45,56,66,69,72], etc.) have been piloted with real users, and finally only three papers ([11,60,67]) describe ecosystems which have been deployed in the real world.…”

Identifying the Needs of Older People for Personalized Assistive Solutions in Romanian Healthcare System

“…In this context, the development of systems that link and interconnect several areas of healthcare, patient-centred perspectives and technologies is still an open issue (Elissen et al, 2016;Bajenaru et al, 2018). The personalized healthcare services involve finding solutions to meet the following challenges: a) implementation of non-invasive ways to monitor the user; b) promoting a usercentred design; c) ensuring emotional comfort by offering personalized services, increasing communication, as well as providing new forms of relaxing environments, ensuring an active ageing process (Marcelino et al, 2018).…”

A Review of Internet of Things Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living Environments

“…-Social inclusion and communication: technologies that aim to enable older people to communicate and interact with others, like family members and friends, in order to maintain their social life and thus improve their well-being [17]; -Psychosocial factors of human-technology interaction and usage: some socio-economic and psychological aspects are relevant for understanding how different profiles of older people interact with and use technologies [18]; -Telemedicine, telehealth and telecare: in order to enable a continuous monitoring of eventual health problems and long-term conditions, typical of older age, remote services offered by healthcare organizations could widen the possibility for older people to access appropriate care and thus improve their health status and clinical outcomes [19]; -Entertainment and media: serious games and smart objects at home could facilitate the daily living of older people by enabling alternative commands for home management or being engaged in proper physical or mental training [20,21]; -Sensing and interacting: sensors installed at home represent a great opportunity for the monitoring of older people's activities and behaviors, as well as the detection of sudden risks or accidents [22]. Such information, when appropriately treated, could be notified to eventual family caregivers or care services for immediate intervention when a problem occurs.…”