Innovative and Assistive eHealth Technologies for Smart Therapeutic and Rehabilitation Outdoor Spaces for the Elderly Demographic

Abstract

The use of technology for social connectivity and achieving engagement goals is increasingly essential to the overall well-being of our rapidly ageing population. While much of the extant literature has focused on home automation and indoor remote health monitoring; there is a growing literature that finds personal health and overall well-being improves when physical activities are conducted outdoors. This study presents a review of possible innovative and assistive eHealth technologies suitable for smart therapeutic and rehabilitation outdoor spaces for older persons. The article also presents key performance metrics required of eHealth technologies to ensure robust, timely and reliable biometric data transfer between patients in a therapeutic landscape environment and respective medical centres. A literature review of relevant publications with a primary focus of integrating sensors and eHealth technologies in outdoor spaces to collect and transfer data from the elderly demographic who engage such built landscapes to appropriate stakeholders was conducted. A content analysis was carried out to synthesize outcomes of the literature review. The study finds that research in assistive eHealth technologies and interfaces for outdoor therapeutic spaces is in its nascent stages and has limited generalisability. The level of technology uptake and readiness for smart outdoor spaces is still developing and is currently being outpaced by the growth of elderly fitness zones in public spaces. Further research is needed to explore those eHealth technologies with interactive feedback mechanisms that are suitable for outdoor therapeutic environments.

Daily Living Activity Recognition In-The-Wild: Modeling and Inferring Activity-Aware Human Contexts

“…This research paper demonstrates a novel two-stage model for sensor-based activity recognition in-the-wild. In the first stage, the proposed scheme classifies six (06) primary physical activities, whereas in the second stage, the proposed scheme infers fourteen (14) activity-aware contexts using the "ExtraSensory" dataset. The outputs from both stages are combined for better cognition and understanding of natural human activities in diverse contexts.…”

“…are generally adopted for indoor activity monitoring in smart homes and buildings [11][12][13]. In contrast, wearable and smartphone-embedded sensors enable pervasive and continuous monitoring of human activities in diverse environments [14]. The authors in [15][16][17][18] provide a review of the wearable sensing systems and technologies for human activity and health monitoring.…”

A Case Study on the Design and Implementation of a Platform for Hand Rehabilitation

“…Studying literature, we found many interesting tools in rehabilitation [3,35,50,56]. However, none of them support different hardware alternatives, connecting hardware of diverse manufacturers.…”

“…Staff efficiency and service quality need to be addressed to reduce waiting times in rehabilitation centers. On the other hand, the question needs to be addressed if we are keeping up with modern times and including technology in the rehabilitation process [1][2][3]. The mentioned drawbacks (expensive equipment, lack of medical staff, lack of time to educate medical staff), can be reduced if computer technology takes the right place in the medical institutions.…”

Evaluation of the effectiveness of technological advances in health education

“…Este sistema simplificado en la figura 2 compromete un servicio web de base de datos, servicio de mensajería y un servidor de Sistema de Información Geográfica (GIS por sus siglas en inglés). Al recibir las señales en esta base de datos, los cuidadores o centros médicos localizan la ubicación en tiempo real del paciente afectado mediante vía telefónica, Asistencia Personal Digital (PDA), Notebook PC, y por varios dispositivos móviles que se encuentren al servicio y disponibilidad de la plataforma en cuestión [10]. Es decir, con esto se demuestra que las TICS no son solamente herramientas destinadas a ser usadas en el ámbito educativo, sino también para cumplir con expectativas de tratamientos y cuidados médicos, de terapias y rehabilitación progresiva, además de tener una función principalmente diagnóstica y preventiva.…”