Review of technology‐supported multimodal solutions for people with dementia

Funding Information: This research was partially funded by FAITH project (H2020?SC1?DTH?2019?875358), CARELINK project (AAL?CALL?2016?049), and Funda??o para a Ci?ncia e Tecnologia through the program UIDB/00066/2020 (CTS?Center of Technology and Systems).Acknowledgments: The authors acknowledge the European Commission for its support and partial funding; the partners of the research project FAITH project (H2020?SC1?DTH?2019?875358); and CARELINK, AAL?CALL?2016?049 funded by AAL JP and co?funded by the European Commission and National Funding Authorities of Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, and Switzerland. Partial support also comes from Funda??o para a Ci?ncia e Tecnologia through the program UIDB/00066/2020 (CTS?Center of Technology and Systems). Funding Information: Acknowledgments: The authors acknowledge the European Commission for its support and partial funding; the partners of the research project FAITH project (H2020‐SC1‐DTH‐2019‐875358); and CARELINK, AAL‐CALL‐2016‐049 funded by AAL JP and co‐funded by the European Commission and National Funding Authorities of Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, and Switzerland. Partial support also comes from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through the program UIDB/00066/2020 (CTS—Center of Technology and Systems). Funding Information: Funding: This research was partially funded by FAITH project (H2020‐SC1‐DTH‐2019‐875358), CARELINK project (AAL‐CALL‐2016‐049), and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through the program UIDB/00066/2020 (CTS—Center of Technology and Systems). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.The number of people living with dementia in the world is rising at an unprecedented rate, and no country will be spared. Furthermore, neither decisive treatment nor effective medicines have yet become effective. One potential alternative to this emerging challenge is utilizing supportive technologies and services that not only assist people with dementia to do their daily activities safely and independently, but also reduce the overwhelming pressure on their caregivers. Thus, for this study, a systematic literature review is conducted in an attempt to gain an overview of the latest findings in this field of study and to address some commercially available supportive technologies and services that have potential application for people living with dementia. To this end, 30 potential supportive technologies and 15 active supportive services are identified from the literature and related websites. The technologies and services are classified into different classes and subclasses (according to their functionalities, capabilities, and features) aiming to facilitate their understanding and evaluation. The results of this work are aimed as a base for designing, integrating, developing, adapting, and customizing potential multimodal solutions for the specific needs of vulnerable people of our societies, such as those who suffer from different degrees of dementia.publishersversionpublishe

Managing the Human Service Market: The Case of Long-Term Care in Japan

Providing human service through competitive markets is inherently problematic. On one hand, quality care is critical; unsatisfactory human service greatly influences people’s quality of life. On the other hand, profit for human service providers is essential for sustainable service provision. This thesis focuses on striking a balance between human services’ need for quality assurance and market providers’ need for profit. The research primarily examines the provision of long-term care for the elderly in Japan, which has the biggest share of aged population among the OECD members. Two research questions guide the empirical research: 1. How should governments design the human service market in order to keep the capacity to ensure the quality of service? 2. How should governments set the performance measurement for quality care? The research presents and tests two models. The first model addresses market competition practices and offers an alternative care quality model, called Ideal CQM. Ideal CQM seeks to overcome deficiencies in the existing care quality model, which allows the market to accommodate poor quality care. To this end, Ideal CQM presents a theoretical market design in which quality of care is the sole basis for market competition. By implementing Idea CQM, governments can direct the market competition to enhance the quality of care and poor quality service can be automatically eliminated from the market. The second model addresses performance measurement and is a process-based model, which values the experiences of front-line care workers. The process-based performance measurement seeks to overcome deficiencies in the existing outcome-based performance measurement, which is rendered ineffectual by two unique features of human service: ambiguous policy goals and a considerable amount of front-line worker discretion. This thesis, thus, modifies the existing concept of market competition utilising public administration theory to accommodate the process-based performance measurement model. The research supports the use of market competition to provide human service for long-term care. Approving the workability and the practicability of the presented two models, the thesis concludes that governments can achieve balance between quality assurance and sustainable provision, if they are willing to meet the required conditions for implementation of the two models

現代日本の元気な高齢者 -家族との関わり様式と自分の世界とのバランス

早大学位記番号:新6420早稲田大

Care Robotics in Aging Japan: Creating Technical Solutions for the World’s Demographic Problem?

Japan is an ideal country for studying the effects of population aging that cause a wide range of societal issues, ranging from labor shortages and increasing pressure on the welfare state, to growing old age-related poverty and the need for improving productivity to sustain economic prosperity. The research question, which the scientific exploration at hand addresses, is what kind of technologies, generically referred to as robots, may be able to mitigate care problems and generate new solutions, and even further, improve the general health of the Japanese population or serve as a blueprint for other aging societies. Therefore, the case of Japan can be utilized to describe which strategies decision-makers face, as well as the challenges and opportunities caused by such a demographic transition to cope with the effects. The Japanese government prioritizes the large-scale introduction of robotics in areas of worsening labor shortages and daily life. The New Robot Strategy (NRS), a five-year policy-action plan compiled in 2015, is the new tool to coordinate the support for actors in the robotics industry, to finally leverage the predicted large market potential. Whereas policy-makers are concerned with creating a better infrastructure for the creation of versatile robots (e.g. regulative considerations, channeling of subsidies), the bureaucracy (e.g. METI, MHLW) is supposed to supervise the policy implementation and to link important public and private actors of robotics development (e.g. universities, robot-makers, research institutes). The coordination of this triangle of three stakeholder groups will be vital for the success of large-scale implementation of robotics to lessen the burden on caregivers, improve average health and wellbeing and exploit the economic potential of the silver market. Rapidly aging societies are a worldwide demographic phenomenon. Whatever feasible technical solution for care Japan invents for its own society is likely to have an impact elsewhere in the world. If the development of care robots works in Japan, it will likely be of fundamental relevance to other aging societies and may incidentally come to be one of the next export successes for Japan. It might be a chance for the government to kill two birds with one stone: taking care of Japan’s elderly and the Japanese economy at the same time. Whether there is a realistic chance this unique technical-driven approach to solving social problems to work out will be at the heart of this academic inquiry

Older survivors of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake five years on: Implications for a future model of an ageing society with Japanese values.

This thesis, an exploratory study, grew out of a concern for an ageing society in the economic stagnation experienced in Japan. Taking Kobe as a case study, the thesis reports social science research on elderly people in urban areas who are poor and have no functioning family. It is a group that will be of increasing concern in the future in Japan and many other countries. My study population lost homes in the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, Japan, and were repeatedly relocated to various types of housing schemes in the following years. By looking at the highly age biased community of Kasetsu (temporary shelter housing: TSH) created after the Kobe Earthquake and the following stage of Fukk? Jutaku (public reconstruction housing: PRH), this research follows the processes of reconstruction for older people after the earthquake with special reference to housing and community work. The research was based primarily upon media analysis, the Hyogo Health Survey, and ethnographic research at selected temporary shelter housings and public reconstruction housing compounds in central and suburban Kobe. I used a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The media is an important part of my research in the Japanese context. By doing secondary analysis of the Hyogo survey data, this thesis describes the changes that the different surveys show. By sampling the media, I show the main foci of public attention, how their views changed and how what they emphasised or presented changed. Older people, especially older people living alone, received considerable attention. I have also sampled three sites in terms of what was happening on the ground and conducted discourse analysis. This thesis shows how one set of myths about TSH was only partly true and how PRH are far from simple solutions to the problem of rehousing survivors. Case studies of the media's presentation of evidence of loneliness and Kodukushi (isolated deaths) have shown how these things are built up from very little into new facts and new aspects of culture. Gender perspectives were employed in all analyses. A gender focus was lacking in public surveys, yet gender was important in qualitative analysis in the media and field sites. The conclusions drawn from this evidence are that disasters are long drawn out events for vulnerable older people, especially those without money or families. Official statistics and the media make their own interpretations of what is going on, and the workers on the ground reproduce many of these views and some old prejudices of their own. Policy implications of this study's findings are considered. Methodology are examined and future research needs discussed

The Politics of Survival and Care in Homeless Japan.

This study explores the politics of survival and care in postindustrial Japan. It draws on archival and ethnographic data gathered during eighteen months of fieldwork between 2009 to 2014 in Kotobuki district, once the nation’s third largest yoseba (day laborers’ quarter) in Yokohama City. I begin with tracking the formation of Kotobuki as an urban underclass neighborhood and its transformation after mob killings of the homeless in its vicinity in the early 1980s. Central to this process was the reconstruction of urban underclass men as the homeless, i.e., elderly relationless men, whose chances of survival were threatened by their isolation. Framed as a struggle to secure the right to survival vis-à-vis the state, the homeless activism in Kotobuki focused on creating relations that could endure the vagaries of welfare policies, changing compositions of the homeless and their supporters, and the constant threat of unexpected death. This study highlights the temporal structure of daily life (seikatsu) underlying social relations and boundaries in Japan Discussing the incorporation of care relations into the politics of survival. In Kotobuki, a variety of reciprocal exchanges of care as diverse as soup kitchens, AA meetings, and medication regimes became tactics of survival embodying the rhythm of life and the will to live. Meanwhile, the temporal orientation toward social subversion, which had once dominated the district, was reconfigured into circulatory rhythms of survival through narrative events where the homeless and their supporters became attuned to each other’s horizons. For the Kotobuki homeless today, survival involves their incorporation into the circulation of care as both receivers and givers beyond the boundary of life and death. This study provides conceptual tools to enrich the study of the state and social exclusion. While the scholarship on the political economy of welfare tends to prioritize the relationship between the state and individual subjects, this study focuses on how individual subjects are made governable through the socioeconomic pressures on concrete relations of care and how everyday struggles for survival involve tackling the logic of these relations.PHDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113543/1/jinikim_1.pd

Reluctant Intimacies. Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands

The thesis explores the tensions in Japan between national ideologies of cultural homogeneity and the demographic and economic realities which increasingly point to the unavoidability of immigration. Based on ethnographic research in Japan and Indonesia, the thesis looks at the formation of relationships between the Japanese personnel, the employers, the cared-for elderly, and the Indonesian care workers employed in Japanese eldercare institutions under the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) initially implemented in 2008. While primarily focusing on the negotiation of relationships at an interpersonal level, the thesis also considers the intersections between the ageing of society and the Japanese discourses of nationhood. Shifting between these scales of observation, the project discusses the interplay between the bodily, interpersonal, and cultural intimacies. It examines how they are formed, maintained, negated, negotiated, and lost. In doing so, it emphasises the saliency of essentialising cultural representations. However, the research reveals that these become paralleled by identifications based on other, non-cultural areas of immediate experience. Thus, the thesis shifts the emphasis away from (but does not completely abandon) the ethnic or national underpinnings of the migration processes as a lived experience for migrants and hosts alike. Following the politico–economic background of the Indonesian workers’ presence in Japan and the introduction of the idea of culture laid out in the vocabulary of intimacy, the consecutive chapters focus on different sets of relationships forged by the Indonesian workers. The thesis concludes with the discussion of media representations and a suggestion that the ‘seeding’ of foreign workers and residents within local communities in Japan constitutes the arena in which cross-cultural intimacies emerge