Towards Personalised Home Care Systems

Home care is increasingly seen as a promising alternative to traditional care services. Programming home care systems remains a significant challenge considering the potentially large scale of deployment, the differences between individual care needs, and the progressive nature of ageing. In this paper, we present ongoing work on programming home care systems to support personalisation, adaptability over time, and dependability. A policy-based approach is used to build such systems. We present the technical details of our approach, including a policy language for home care and the corresponding system architecture. Policy examples are used to illustrate how the approach supports personalisation of home care services

Major requirements for building Smart Homes in Smart Cities based on Internet of Things technologies

The recent boom in the Internet of Things (IoT) will turn Smart Cities and Smart Homes (SH) from hype to reality. SH is the major building block for Smart Cities and have long been a dream for decades, hobbyists in the late 1970s made Home Automation (HA) possible when personal computers started invading home spaces. While SH can share most of the IoT technologies, there are unique characteristics that make SH special. From the result of a recent research survey on SH and IoT technologies, this paper defines the major requirements for building SH. Seven unique requirement recommendations are defined and classified according to the specific quality of the SH building blocks

Advanced practice nursing health care needs assessment in an underserved community

The purpose of this study was to gain information about the community health care needs through a comprehensive assessment. This information will allow providers to identify services and groups of people where the biggest gap exists in receiving needed health care services. This may provide the basis for the design of an advanced practice preventative health intervention for the community

A System for Controlling, Monitoring and Programming the Home

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities. In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home. This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality. Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables. The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home

Escalonamento de visitas domiciliárias de um centro de saúde

A saúde é um dos poderosos fatores de integração e coesão social, mas também de geração de riqueza e bem-estar. Nas sociedades desenvolvidas, o envelhecimento da população constitui uma evidência. Portugal, assim como outros países da Europa, tem vindo a registar nas últimas décadas profundas transformações demográficas caracterizadas, entre outros aspetos, pelo aumento da longevidade e da população idosa e pela redução da natalidade e população jovem. Assim, os cuidados de saúde domiciliários são cuidados prestados de forma continuada, orientados para a resolução dos problemas de saúde das pessoas e cuja complexidade não requer a sua institucionalização mas que, pela sua situação de dependência global, transitória ou crónica, as impede de se deslocarem aos Centros de Saúde, distinguindo-se este conceito por hospitalização domiciliária. Os cuidados de saúde domiciliários concretizamse através de Visitas Domiciliárias, cuja periodicidade das visitas programadas varia em função das necessidades de cuidados do doente e deverá ser estabelecida, consensualmente na e em equipa, onde necessariamente se inclui o doente, o cuidador e/ou família, com base nos resultados que se pretende atingir. Normalmente, as visitas são planeadas de forma manual e sem apoio computacional. Desta forma, torna-se imprescindível, para as Unidades de Saúde que desempenham serviços de cuidados ao domicílio, otimizar os planeamentos relacionados. Assim, surge o problema de planeamento de rotas para veículos (Vehicle Routing Problem, VRP), um problema complexo de otimização combinatória bem conhecido, cujo objetivo é encontrar a rota mais curta. Neste caso, para as equipas de profissionais de saúde, realizam procedimentos médicos para pacientes doentes, na qual administram medicamentos e vários tipos de tratamentos. Neste trabalho, pretende-se realizar o planeamento automático das visitas domiciliárias, de uma Unidade de Saúde de Bragança, com o objetivo de minimizar o tempo total despendido pelos enfermeiros e, desta forma, reduzir os custos envolvidos. Também se pretende, com este trabalho verificar qual a metodologia mais eficaz para realizar as visitas domiciliárias, comparando os resultados obtidos pela metodologia que irá ser abordada com um algoritmo de programação inteira, com os resultados obtidos pela metodologia já estudada em literatura, o Algoritmo Genético. A metodologia desenvolvida foi testada no CPLEX, que permitiu resolver o problema de forma eficiente e breve em tempo de resolução, obtendo as respetivas soluções de planeamento das visitas domiciliárias para os dados apresentados. Em todos os horários das visitas domiciliárias a realizar pelos enfermeiros, verificou-se uma redução significativa do tempo gasto pelos enfermeiros, assim como, no tempo de espera dos pacientes.Health is one of the powerful factors of social integration and cohesion, but also of wealth and well-being. In developed societies, the aging of the population is evidence. Portugal, as well as other European countries, has undergone deep demographic changes in recent decades, characterized by, among other aspects, the increase in longevity and the elderly population, the reduction of the birth rate and the young population. Therefore, home health care is a continuous of care directed at solving people’s health problems and whose complexity does not require institutionalization but which, because of their global, transitory or chronic dependence, prevents them from to the Health Centers, distinguishing this concept by home hospitalization. Home health care is carried out through Home Visits, whose periodicity of scheduled visits varies according to the patient’s care needs and should be established, consensually in and in a team, where necessarily includes the patient, caregiver and/or family, based on the results to be achieved. Usually visits are planned manually and without computer support. In this way, it is essential for the Health Units that perform home care services to optimize related planning. Thus, arises the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), a well-known complex combinatorial optimization problem, which aims to find the shortest route. In this case, for teams of healthcare professionals, they perform medical procedures for sick patients who administer medications and various types of use. In this study, we intend to carry out the automatic planning of home visits, from a Bragança Health Unit, with the aim of minimizing the total time spent by nurses and, in this way, reducing the costs involved. It is also intended, with this work, to verify which is the most effective methodology to make home visits, comparing the results obtained by the methodology that will be approached with an entire programming algorithm, with the results of the methodology already studied in the literature, or in the genetic algorithm. The developed methodology was tested in the CPLEX, which allowed to solve the problem in an efficient and brief way in resolution time, obtaining the respective solutions of home visits planning for the presented data. At all times of home visits by nurses, there was a significant reduction in the time spent by nurses, as well as in patients’ waiting time

Programming Home Care

The home is composed of many different devices, services and technologies. These rarely communicate with one another, and require various different computer systems and applications to be able to interact with them all remotely. A challenge within telecare is being able to exploit the functionality of these devices within the home and offer a common means of control, monitoring and programming, either locally or remotely. Homer, a home system designed and developed at the University of Stirling, can communicate with any device within the home and then expose the functionality to a range of different interfaces on different platforms and devices. This paper introduces Homer, describing how it communicates with the devices within the home, a brief description of the system architecture, and finally describes its user interfaces for the home. Home requirements are introduced at the beginning of the paper, explored throughout, and finally evaluated at the end