80,760 research outputs found

    Progress in ambient assisted systems for independent living by the elderly

    Get PDF
    One of the challenges of the ageing population in many countries is the efficient delivery of health and care services, which is further complicated by the increase in neurological conditions among the elderly due to rising life expectancy. Personal care of the elderly is of concern to their relatives, in case they are alone in their homes and unforeseen circumstances occur, affecting their wellbeing. The alternative; i.e. care in nursing homes or hospitals is costly and increases further if specialized care is mobilized to patients’ place of residence. Enabling technologies for independent living by the elderly such as the ambient assisted living systems (AALS) are seen as essential to enhancing care in a cost-effective manner. In light of significant advances in telecommunication, computing and sensor miniaturization, as well as the ubiquity of mobile and connected devices embodying the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), end-to-end solutions for ambient assisted living have become a reality. The premise of such applications is the continuous and most often real-time monitoring of the environment and occupant behavior using an event-driven intelligent system, thereby providing a facility for monitoring and assessment, and triggering assistance as and when needed. As a growing area of research, it is essential to investigate the approaches for developing AALS in literature to identify current practices and directions for future research. This paper is, therefore, aimed at a comprehensive and critical review of the frameworks and sensor systems used in various ambient assisted living systems, as well as their objectives and relationships with care and clinical systems. Findings from our work suggest that most frameworks focused on activity monitoring for assessing immediate risks while the opportunities for integrating environmental factors for analytics and decision-making, in particular for the long-term care were often overlooked. The potential for wearable devices and sensors, as well as distributed storage and access (e.g. cloud) are yet to be fully appreciated. There is a distinct lack of strong supporting clinical evidence from the implemented technologies. Socio-cultural aspects such as divergence among groups, acceptability and usability of AALS were also overlooked. Future systems need to look into the issues of privacy and cyber security

    MOSAIC roadmap for mobile collaborative work related to health and wellbeing.

    Get PDF
    The objective of the MOSAIC project is to accelerate innovation in Mobile Worker Support Environments. For that purpose MOSAIC develops visions and illustrative scenarios for future collaborative workspaces involving mobile and location-aware working. Analysis of the scenarios is input to the process of road mapping with the purpose of developing strategies for R&D leading to deployment of innovative mobile work technologies and applications across different domains. One of the application domains where MOSAIC is active is health and wellbeing. This paper builds on another paper submitted to this same conference, which presents and discusses health care and wellbeing specific scenarios. The aim is to present an early form of a roadmap for validation

    Connected Women: How Mobile Can Support Women's Economic and Social Empowerment

    Get PDF
    This report explores how mobile services provided by Vodafone and the Vodafone Foundation are enabling women to seize new opportunities and improve their lives. Accenture Sustainability Services were commissioned to conduct research on the services and to assess their potential social and economic impact if they were widely available across Vodafone's markets by 2020. It showcases the projects and the work of those involved and also poses the question -- what would the benefit to women and to society at large be if projects such as these were taken to scale and achieved an industrialscale of growth? This reflects the Foundation's commitment not solely to the development of pilots but rather the Trustees' ambition to see projects which lead to transformational change. In order to understand this more deeply, the Report looks at the benefits for women and society and providessome financial modelling for how the engagement of commercial players could achieve industrial, sustainable growth in these areas. Accenture has provided the modelling and, given the public benefit and understanding which the report seeks to generate, these are shared openly for all in the mobile industry to understand and share. It is the Trustees' hope that the collaboration with Oxford University and Accenture in the delivery of this Report will stimulate not only the expansion of existing charitable programmes but will also seed other philanthropic, social enterprise or commercial initiatives

    What does it take to make integrated care work? A ‘cookbook’ for large-scale deployment of coordinated care and telehealth

    Get PDF
    The Advancing Care Coordination & Telehealth Deployment (ACT) Programme is the first to explore the organisational and structural processes needed to successfully implement care coordination and telehealth (CC&TH) services on a large scale. A number of insights and conclusions were identified by the ACT programme. These will prove useful and valuable in supporting the large-scale deployment of CC&TH. Targeted at populations of chronic patients and elderly people, these insights and conclusions are a useful benchmark for implementing and exchanging best practices across the EU. Examples are: Perceptions between managers, frontline staff and patients do not always match; Organisational structure does influence the views and experiences of patients: a dedicated contact person is considered both important and helpful; Successful patient adherence happens when staff are engaged; There is a willingness by patients to participate in healthcare programmes; Patients overestimate their level of knowledge and adherence behaviour; The responsibility for adherence must be shared between patients and health care providers; Awareness of the adherence concept is an important factor for adherence promotion; The ability to track the use of resources is a useful feature of a stratification strategy, however, current regional case finding tools are difficult to benchmark and evaluate; Data availability and homogeneity are the biggest challenges when evaluating the performance of the programmes

    Surveying Persons with Disabilities: A Source Guide (Version 1)

    Get PDF
    As a collaborator with the Cornell Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. has been working on a project that identifies the strengths and limitations in existing disability data collection in both content and data collection methodology. The intended outcomes of this project include expanding and synthesizing knowledge of best practices and the extent existing data use those practices, informing the development of data enhancement options, and contributing to a more informed use of existing data. In an effort to provide the public with an up-to-date and easily accessible source of research on the methodological issues associated with surveying persons with disabilities, MPR has prepared a Source Guide of material related to this topic. The Source Guide contains 150 abstracts, summaries, and references, followed by a Subject Index, which cross references the sources from the Reference List under various subjects. The Source Guide is viewed as a “living document,” and will be periodically updated

    Adults only: disability, social policy and the life course

    Get PDF
    This article examines the relationship between disability, generation and social policy. The moral and legislative framework for the post-war welfare settlement was grounded in a long-standing cultural construction of ‘normal’ life course progression. Disability and age (along with gender) were the key components in this construction, defining broad categories of welfare dependency and labour force exemption. However, social changes and the emergence of new policy discourses have brought into question the way in which we think about dependency and welfare at the end of the twentieth century. The article suggests that, as policy-makers pursue their millennial settlement with mothers, children and older people, they also may be forced to reconstruct the relationship between disabled people and the welfare state

    Revisiting labour history

    Get PDF
    A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since, in their anticipation of a Turkish invasion, the Order of St. John perceived the eldest island inhabitants as ‘useless civilians’ and evacuated them to Sicily. Malta nowadays holds a key place in the history of international ageing policy. The Maltese Government made Malta the first nation to raise the subject of population ageing as an issue of world concern. This occurred in 1969 when it successfully appealed to the United Nations for the theme’s inclusion on the agenda of the 24th session of the General Assembly. This led to unprecedented awareness on the effects of population ageing. The United Nations eventually organised a World Assembly on Ageing in 1982 where, to Malta’s credit, the designated chairperson was a Maltese citizen. However, as Brincat recently highlighted, the history of the modern Maltese welfare state awaits detailed study. This is especially true with respect to policies relating to later life. Historical analyses of the development of social policies in Malta tend to focus on general health, educational, and labour issues, and hardly any attention is awarded towards the foundation of those services geared towards older persons. Given the space limitations, and specific focus of this publication, this paper does not seek to address such a lacuna. Rather, its goal is to conduct a critical overview as how the development of local ageing policy was stimulated and influenced by the values and judgements of the Labour Party in Malta.peer-reviewe

    If telecare is the answer, what was the question? Storyline, tensions and the unintended consequences of technology-supported care

    Get PDF
    This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Critical Social Policy, March 2018, published by SAGE Publishing. Content in the UH Research Archive is made available for personal research, educational, and non-commercial purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, all content is protected by copyright, and in the absence of an open license, permissions for further re-use should be sought from the publisher, the author, or other copyright holder.Telecare—services employing technology to monitor people’s movement, medication and home environment at a distance—has emerged as a key component of global social care and health policies. The relationship between policies about telecare and the experiences and aspirations of service users has been under-interrogated. This paper draws on findings from an organisational case study involving people living with complex conditions using various telecare devices and employs Hajer’s (1995) concept of argumentative discourse analysis to identify two key storylines arguing that telecare improves people’s quality of life and promotes independence. While these storylines point to seemingly logical and incontestable objectives, uncritical policy and practice fails to recognise and prioritise the aspirations of service users, leading to unintended consequences that can deepen people’s isolation and minimise organisational benefits.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
    corecore