An Ambient Assisted Living Technology Platform for Informal Carers of the Elderly - iCarer

For most families with elderly relatives, care within their own home is by far the most preferred option -both for the elderly and their carers. However, frequently these carers are the partners of the person with long-term care needs, and themselves are elderly and in need of support to cope with the burdens and stress associated with these duties. When it becomes too much for them, they may have to rely on professional care services, or even use residential care for a respite. In order to support the carers as well as the elderly person, an ambient assisted living platform has been developed. The system records information about the activities of daily living using unobtrusive sensors within the home, and allows the carers to record their own wellbeing state. By providing facilities to schedule and monitor the activities of daily care, and providing orientation and advice to improve the care given and their own wellbeing, the system helps to reduce the burden on the informal carers

iCarer Project: Intelligent Care Guidance and Learning Services Platform for Informal Carers of the Elderly

The increasing ageing population is demanding new care approaches to maintain the quality of life of elderly people. Informal carers are becoming crucial agents in the care and support of elderly people, which can lead to those carers suffering from additional stress due to competing priorities with employment or due to lack of knowledge about elderly people?s care needs. Thus, support and stress relief in carers should be a key issue in the home-care process of these older adults. Considering this context, this work presents the iCarer project aimed at developing a personalized and adaptive platform to offer informal carers support by means of monitoring their activities of daily care and psychological state, as well as providing an orientation to help them improve the care provided. Additionally, iCarer will provide e-Learning services and an informal carers learning network. As a result, carers will be able to expand their knowledge, supported by the experience provided by expert counsellors and fellow carers. Additionally, the coordination between formal and informal carers will be improved, offering the informal carers flexibility to organize and combine their assistance and social activities

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL

The human behaviour indicator: a measure of behavioural evolution

Activities of daily living (ADL) or activities of daily working (ADW) may be affected by changes in a person’s health or well-being. Measuring progressive changes in one activity or multiple activities is representative of behavioural variations. By inspecting the trends in multiple activities, it is possible to identify and predict human behavioural changes. We refer to the trends in people's behaviour as behavioural evolution. In this paper, we propose a novel indicator to measure the progressive changes representing a participant's behavioural evolution. The proposed indicator presents activities as a holistic measure, which first combine multi-activities and then measure the progressive changes in the combined activities for each single day. Real data sets were collected from a wireless sensor network and used to examine our proposed technique. As part of this process, we were able to quantify progressive changes for individual and aggregated activities. Our experimental results demonstrated that: (1) the proposed approach can identify and distinguish normal and abnormal behaviours; (2) large data sets gathered from sensors in an intelligent environment represented in various time series can be visualised in a simple and more understandable format; (3) identifying trends in ADLs or ADWs is a relevant means of sharing information with carers or supervisors

Revisiting the Technology Challenges and Proposing Enhancements in Ambient Assisted Living for the Elderly

Several social and technical trends support the elderly’s desire to live independently in their preferred environment, despite their increasing medical needs, and enhance their quality of life at home. Ambient-assisted living (AAL) has the capabilities to support the elderly and to decrease their dependency on formal or informal caregivers. We provide a review of the technological challenges that were identified as inhibiting factors in the past decade and then present recent technological advances, e.g., cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things. We also fill the gap in the current literature in regard to specific AAL solutions and propose fourth-generation AAL technology design. We find that most informal caregivers are family members who are medically untrained and that the use of advanced analytical processes on AAL-generated data could significantly increase symptom identification. We also present the implications and remaining challenges along with recommendations for future research

Seeing the wood for the trees. Carer related research and knowledge: A scoping review

This NIHR-SSCR funded scoping review provides a comprehensive mapping of what is known about carers and caring, and aims to help inform policy, practice and research in relation to carers. The review was undertaken by searching 10 electronic bibliographic databases, supplemented by additional web searches to identify academic research, grey literature and wider knowledge. The analysis adopts a selective thematic approach covering: carer variables - the characteristics of different types of carer and different caring situations; types of care - the nature of needs of the cared for person and the features of the care situation; the impact of caring – resilience and coping, employment and health; and carer support and needs assessment. The final section highlights key messages identified from the review. It found that caring involves all sections and age groups of the population, with people are likely to experience one or more periods of caregiving over their lifetime. The uniqueness of each caring relationship is also highlighted. In relation to types of carers, knowledge about ‘hard to reach’ groups, such as BAME and LGBT carers, remains sparse. Older carers are also relatively invisible in policy and research terms. It found that much of the knowledge about carers identified in the review relates to their characteristics, their lived experience and the nature of their caregiving, with relatively less being known about the effectiveness of interventions to support them. The report concludes by offering suggestions for policy and practice. An appendix provides a bibliography of the 3,434 items identified in review, classified into 17 types of reference

Trend analysis for human activities recognition

Smart environments equipped with appropriate sensory devices are used to measure people's activities. These activities represent Activities of Daily Living (ADL) or Activities of Daily Working (ADW). Measuring progressive changes in activities is a subject of research interest. A number of medical conditions and their treatments are associated with progressive changes such as reduced movement over time. The aim of this research is to determine means of inspecting trends in the ADL/ADW to identify progressive changes and predict behavioural abnormalities. The ADL/ADW pattern will change over time and this is a consequence of the individual's condition. Identifying evolving behavioural patterns will help to predict the trend in the ADL/ADW behavioural pattern before any abnormalities are identifed. The data provided for this investigation are from real environments home and office). Additionally, a simulator is developed to generate simulated data for ADLs. To answer the research question identifed in this research, the initial investigation was conducted and a novel Human Behaviour Momentum Indicator (HBMI) is proposed. The HBMI is introduced to identify changes based on activities recorded from a single sensor. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, results are compared with Relative Strength Index (RSI). The results show that trends in ADL or ADW can be detected and the direction of the activity's trend is predicted. To represent a holistic report based on a multiple sensors/activities representing progressive changes in the participant's behaviour, a novel Human Behaviour Indicator (HBI) is also proposed. The proposed HBI indicator is constructed as a composite indicator, which will compute progressive changes in behaviour based on the events that are performed during the entire day. The percentage of changes between events is used to compare events and measure the progressive changes. The proposed technique identifies the user's daily behaviour and distinguishes between normal and abnormal behavioural patterns of the ADLs or ADWs. Analysis of the data indicates that the HBI could clearly differentiate between the normal and the abnormal behaviour and give a warning status with a confidence level. Identifying trends in ADLs or ADWs using trend analysis techniques are investigated to interpret the behavioural changes in a suitable format to be understood by the carers or supervisors

Intervención de enfermería basada en la dinámica del cuidado para la sobrecarga de cuidadores familiares de adultos mayores dependientes hospitalizados

140 páginasEl cuidado que realizan los familiares de adultos mayores dependientes los conduce a estados de sobrecarga por desgaste físico, emocional, social y económico que siguen presentes durante las hospitalizaciones. Objetivo: Evaluar el efecto de una intervención de enfermería basada en la dinámica del cuidado, comparada con el cuidado convencional, sobre el nivel de sobrecarga de cuidadores familiares de adultos mayores dependientes hospitalizados. Metodología: Diseño cuasi experimental pre test – post test, con grupo experimental y grupo de comparación, con una muestra de 68 cuidadores. Resultados: El nivel de sobrecarga de los cuidadores del grupo experimental tuvo una media pre test de 63,2 y 52,8 post test, y el grupo de comparación tuvo una media pre test de 56,9 y 59,6 post test. Conclusiones: La aplicación de la intervención diseñada generó cambios significativos en el cuidador que permitieron modular los niveles de sobrecarga durante la hospitalización del adulto mayor dependiente.Maestría en EnfermeríaMagíster en Enfermerí