Insuring Quality Long-Term Nursing Care

Includes bibliographical references.The oldest members of the Baby Boom generation born between 1946 and 1964 will turn sixty-five in 2011. As the size of our senior population increases over the next few decades, so will their health care needs. In the early decades of this century, the proportion of elderly citizens in our total population is expected to steadily rise from the present level of approximately 12 percent to an estimated peak of 20 percent in 2030. The needs are great. Researchers, health care professionals, and interested citizens must find ways to care for the growing senior population in ways that meet the elders' needs and insure the quality of the nursing care received

Improving the Quality of Elder Care: The Continuing Care Retirement Community

Includes bibliographical references.By 2020, the segment of the population 65 and older will have increased by 42% to reach over one million persons and those 85 and older will number roughly 129,000. These trends indicate an increase in the demands for social services, such as housing and formal health care, including long-term nursing care. One option that provides for the needs of the elderly is the Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC)

A Novel Web-Based Depth Video Rewind Approach toward Fall Preventive Interventions in Hospitals

Falls in the hospital rooms are considered a huge burden on healthcare costs. They can lead to injuries, extended length of stay, and increase in cost for both the patients and the hospital. It can also lead to emotional trauma for the patients and their families [1]. Having Microsoft Kinects installed in the hospital rooms to capture and process every movement in the room, we deployed our previously developed fall-detection system to detect naturally occurring falls, generate a real-time fall alarm and broadcast it to hospital nurses for immediate intervention. These systems also store a processed and reduced version of the 3D depth videos on a central file storage to provide information to the dedicated nursing team for post-fall quality improvement process. The compression technique that helps reducing video size by omitting non-movement frames from it also makes it almost impossible for the hospital staff to find the event that led to a fall alarm. There was a need to visualize fall events and the video contents accordingly. In this paper, we describe a web-application with a handy user interface to easily search among terabytes of depth videos to facilitate the finding and reviewing of the chain of events that lead to a patient fall. We will also discuss the improvements in the new version of the application which reduced the size of transferred videos by converting them to MP4 videos and makes the application platform free. This improvements in speed and compatibility on different browsers, caused more user satisfaction and more frequent use of the web-application

Automated Estimation of Elder Activity Levels from Anonymized Video Data

Significant declines in quality of life for elders in assisted living communities are typically triggered by health events. Given the necessary information, such events can often be predicted, and thus, be avoided or reduced in severity. Statistics on activities of daily living and activity level over an extended period of time provide important data for functional assessment and health prediction. However, persistent activity monitoring and continuous collection of this type of data is extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. In this work, we propose a method for automated estimation of activity levels based on silhouettes segmented from video data, and subsequent extraction of higher order information from the silhouettes. By building a regression model from this higher order information, our system can automatically estimate elder activity levels

Technology for Successful Aging

With our partners at the University of Virginia we are developing a system of sensors, to monitor the activity of seniors in their residences. We measure motion, footfalls, sleep and restlessness, we have stove sensors and sensing mats, all connected wirelessly to a computer which performs an initial evaluation and data transfer to a secure server for further study. Based upon the monitor data we will implement an intervention to ameliorate functional decline. Focus group studies determine the attitudes, concerns and impressions of the residents and staff. We find that senior's attitude to technology is healthy and they will try helpful approaches. In addition to the statistical comparisons, we model the data using hidden Markov models, integrate or fuse the monitor data with video images, and reason about behavior using fuzzy logic. The results of this work will additionally reduce the workload on caregivers, foster communication between residents and family,and give these seniors independence.The authors are grateful for the support from NSF ITR grant IIS-0428420 and the U.S. Administration on Aging, under grant 90AM3013

A Real-time System for In-home Activity Monitoring of Elders

In this paper, we propose a real-time system for in-home activity monitoring and functional assessment for elder care. We describe the development of the whole system which could be used to assist the independent living of elders and improve the efficiency of eldercare practice. With this system, data is collected, silhouettes extracted, features further analyzed and visualized into graphs from which eldercare professionals are able to understand massive video monitoring data within a short period of time. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system is efficient in indoor elder activities monitoring and easily utilized by eldercare professionals.This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health under grant 1R21AG026412-01A2

Anonymized Video Analysis Methods and Systems

Methods and systems for anonymized video analysis are described. In one embodiment, a first silhouette image of a person in a living unit may be accessed. The first silhouette image may be based on a first video signal recorded by a first video camera. A second silhouette image of the person in the living unit may be accessed. The second silhouette image may be of a different view of the person than the first silhouette image. The second silhouette image may be based on a second video signal recorded by a second video camera. A three-dimensional model of the person in voxel space may be generated based on the first silhouette image, the second silhouette image, and viewing conditions of the first video camera and the second video camera. In some embodiments, information on falls, gait parameters, and other movements of the person living unit are determined. Additional methods and systems are disclosed

TigerPlace: An Innovative Educational and Research Environment

This item also falls under AAAI copyright. For more information, please visit http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/indexA one of a kind project based on the concept of aging in place is in progress at the University of Missouri (MU). This project required legislation in 1999 and 2001 to be fully realized. A specialized home health agency was developed by the MU Sinclair School of Nursing specifically to help older adults age in place. In 2004, TigerPlace, a specially designed independent living environment, was built by Americare Corporation of Sikeston, Missouri, a leading long-term care company. TigerPlace was developed as a true partnership between the University of Missouri and Americare Corporation. This partnership allows for unique student and research projects.This research was supported by the U.S. Administration on Aging grant #90AM3013 and National Science Foundation ITR grants IIS-0428420 and IIS-0703692

TigerPlace, a State-Academic-Private Project to Revolutionize Traditional Long Term Care

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the Journal of Housing for the Elderly 2008, copyright Taylor & Francis. Journal of Housing for the Elderly is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0276-3893&volume=22&issue=1&spage=66 DOI:10.1080/02763890802097045The Aging in Place Project at the University of Missouri (MU) required legislation in 1999 and 2001 to be fully realized. An innovative home health agency was initiated by the Sinclair School of Nursing specifically to help older adults age in place in the environment of their choice. In 2004, an innovative independent living environment was built and is operated by a private long term care company, as a special facility where residents can truly age in place and never fear being moved to a traditional nursing home unless they choose to do so. With care provided by the home care agency with registered nurse care coordination services, residents receive preventative and early illness recognition assistance that have markedly improved their lives. Evaluation of aging in place reveal registered nurse care coordination improves outcomes of cognition, depression, activities of daily living, incontinence, pain, and shortness of breath as well as delaying or preventing nursing home placement. Links with MU students, faculty, and nearly every school or college on campus enrich the lives of the students and residents of the housing environment. Research projects are encouraged and residents who choose to participate are enjoying helping with developing cutting technology to help other seniors age in place.The authors wish to acknowledge the organizations and staff who made the AIP project possible: Americare of Sikeston, MO; TigerPlace staff; Sinclair Home Care staff; MU Sinclair School of Nursing faculty and deans; MU administration; Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services staff; Missouri state legislature (in particular, Tim Harlan of Columbia, MO); and all the friends and families who have supported those who implemented this pioneering effort

Disengagement in the Chronically Ill

Disengagement theory is based on the occurrence of severance or alteration of relationships between the elderly and society. Descriptive accounts of the behaviors of chronically ill individuals strikingly resemble the disengagement behaviors of the elderly described by the research of Cumming and Henry. The purpose of this study was to determine if the process of disengagement occurs in chronically ill individuals. It was hypothesized that individuals with chronic illnesses would report a higher disengagement score following the development of their chronic illness than prior to the development of their chronic illness. A random sample of 29 chronically ill individuals between the ages of 24 and 49 completed two modified Henthorn disengagement Indexes. One was completed by each individual to reflect status prior to chronic illness; the other was completed to reflect current status. Results of the modified Henthorn Disengagement Indexes were analyzed as disengagement scores and disengagement profiles describing current and previous status. These were then compared using Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test at the .05 significance level. The hypothesis was supported. Significant disengagement changes were found in the areas of work in the role-set category (p .0005) and total role-set (p .0005); significant engagement change was found in the area of leisure (p .005) in the role importance category. Recommendations include changes in the scoring procedure of the Index and in the exclusion of subjects with intervening demographic variables the year prior to chronic illness. Also recommended is the duplication of the study design and the application of the disengagement theory to the population of chronically ill individuals