scholarly journals SCoPE: Service Composition and Personalization Environment

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 2297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thais A. Baldissera ◽  
Luis M. Camarinha-Matos

Current demographic trends suggest that people are living longer, while the ageing process entails many necessities calling for care services tailored to the individual senior’s needs and life style. Personalized provision of care services usually involves a number of stakeholders, including relatives, friends, caregivers, professional assistance organizations, enterprises, and other support entities. Traditional Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based care and assistance services for the elderly have been mainly focused on the development of isolated and generic services, considering a single service provider, and excessively featuring a techno-centric approach. In contrast, advances on collaborative networks for elderly care suggest the integration of services from multiple providers, encouraging collaboration as a way to provide better personalized services. This approach requires a support system to manage the personalization process and allow ranking the {service, provider} pairs. In accordance with these requirements, an Elderly Care Ecosystem (ECE) framework and a Service Composition and Personalization Environment (SCoPE) are proposed. ECE provides the context for the personalization method which is based on the match between a taxonomy of care needs and the {service, provider} pairs, and the calculation of a service adherence index to identify suitable services and corresponding providers. To demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of SCoPE, a number of methods and algorithms are presented. Furthermore, an illustrative scenario is introduced in which {service, provider} pairs are ranked based on multidimensional assessment method and composition strategies are based on customer’s profile and requirements.

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Klasa ◽  
Stephanie Galaitsi ◽  
Andrew Wister ◽  
Igor Linkov

AbstractThe care needs for aging adults are increasing burdens on health systems around the world. Efforts minimizing risk to improve quality of life and aging have proven moderately successful, but acute shocks and chronic stressors to an individual’s systemic physical and cognitive functions may accelerate their inevitable degradations. A framework for resilience to the challenges associated with aging is required to complement on-going risk reduction policies, programs and interventions. Studies measuring resilience among the elderly at the individual level have not produced a standard methodology. Moreover, resilience measurements need to incorporate external structural and system-level factors that determine the resources that adults can access while recovering from aging-related adversities. We use the National Academies of Science conceptualization of resilience for natural disasters to frame resilience for aging adults. This enables development of a generalized theory of resilience for different individual and structural contexts and populations, including a specific application to the COVID-19 pandemic.


BMC Nursing ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Cheng ◽  
Jiong Tu ◽  
Xiaoyan Shen

Abstract Background With China’s population ageing rapidly, stroke is becoming one of the major public health problems. Nurses are indispensable for caring for older patients with acute and convalescent stroke, and their working experiences are directly linked to the quality of care provided. The study aims to investigate registered nurses’ experiences of caring for older stroke patients. Methods A qualitative descriptive design was adopted. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with 26 registered nurses about their lived experiences of caring for older stroke patients. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Results Two main themes were identified. First, the nurses identified an obvious gap between their ideal role in elderly care and their actual practice. The unsatisfactory reality was linked to the practical difficulties they encountered in their working environment. Second, the nurses expressed conflicting feelings about caring for older stroke patients, displaying a sense of accomplishment, indifference, annoyance, and sympathy. Caring for older stroke patients also affects nurses psychologically and physically. The nurses were clear about their own roles and tried their best to meet the elderly people’s needs, yet they lack time and knowledge about caring for older stroke patients. The factors influencing their working experiences extend beyond the personal domain and are linked to the wider working environment. Conclusions Sustaining the nursing workforce and improving their working experiences are essential to meet the care needs of older people. Understanding nurses’ lived working experiences is the first step. At the individual level, nurse mangers should promote empathy, relieve anxiety about aging, and improve the job satisfaction and morale of nurses. At the institutional level, policymakers should make efforts to improve the nursing clinical practice environment, increase the geriatric nursing education and training, achieve a proper skill mix of the health workforce, and overall attract, prepare and sustain nurses regarding caring for older people in a rapidly aging society.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 8-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Nilsson ◽  
Kerstin Nilsson

An increasing number of older people in the population will bring new challenges for the society and care coordination. One of the most important questions in care coordination is the employees’ work performance. The overall aim of this study was to examine care employees’ experience of factors that rule how they allocate their time and tasks in the care work. The study was qualitative and consists of focus group interviews with 36 employees in elderly care in five Swedish municipalities. Much of the work that care employees perform is controlled by others in the municipality organised health care. The employees had a limited possibility to decide what should be given priority in their work. However, the employees who participated in the focus group interviews did not want to prioritise tasks and duties they felt were faulty or in direct conflict with their own convictions. When employees experienced that the assistance assessments were correct and helpful to the individual elderly patient this contributed to the employees’ priority and performance of the task. The formal and informal control systems caused the employees’ priority to be mainly quantitative and visible work tasks, rather than more qualitative tasks and care giving to the elderly. In the intention to organise good care coordination that fit each elderly patients’ need it is important that those who work closest to the patient to a greater extent are given the opportunity to make their voice heard in decisions of care planning and assistance assessments.


2021 ◽  
Vol 275 ◽  
pp. 03003
Author(s):  
Yi Ding ◽  
Zhe Zhang ◽  
Meiyun Yang ◽  
Fengqi Sun

This research focuses on a service acquisition mode for parents in urban separated families of China to promote the popularization of elderly care services in Internet economy. Based on interviews and questionnaires, authors find the pain point of the elderly care service acquisition mode and propose a tripartite participatory mode. Using this new service acquisition mode, adult children can play an assistant role with a smartphone-based service purchase platform. Next, in order to determine what services should be provided priorly on the platform, an empirical study based on questionnaires and KANO model is carried out to screen a propriate services items. Through the innovation of new elderly care service acquisition mode, more practitioners are supposed to expands their business effectively in aging market, and to play an ever more active role in the growth of Internet economy.


China Report ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-353
Author(s):  
Zhu Bifan ◽  
Li Fen ◽  
Wang Linan ◽  
Wang Changying ◽  
Jin Chunlin

This study aims to summarise the characteristics of elderly care system and analyse expenditures of healthcare for the elderly in Shanghai. The authors use medical records of 2015 and health account results of 2014 based on System of Health Accounts 2011 to describe the pattern of care expenditures for elderly. Individuals aged 60 years and above account for 19.5 per cent of Shanghai’s population but utilise 52.2 per cent of all outpatient visits and 45.3 per cent of all hospitalisations. Almost two-thirds of their medical expenditures occur in hospitals and 16 per cent in community health centres, corresponding to the status of resource allocation. The out-of-pocket payment ratio of the elderly is lower than that of the younger adults, which is attributable to the preferential reimbursement polices set by the insurance schemes. The leading causes of expenditures are cardiovascular disease, neoplasms and respiratory diseases. Care for the elderly costs more, and the elderly use more services than other age groups. The article recommends the monitoring of irrational utilisation of services, strengthening of primary level care and integration of services across different facilities to streamline care for elderly in Shanghai.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Filzah Md Isa ◽  
Shaista Noor ◽  
Goh Wei Wei ◽  
Sharifah Diyana Binti Syed Hussain ◽  
Hairunnisa Mohamad Ibrahim ◽  
...  

Purpose Malaysia is considered to be a relatively young country as compared to other older countries such as Japan, China and Australia in terms of the ageing population. However, until 2035, Malaysia will be in the ageing group countries as 15% of the entire population will be above 60 years of age. This situation is quite alarming as more and more ageing care centres will be required to fulfill the ongoing demands of the ageing population. The elderly care centres in Malaysia are categorised as public (sponsored by the government), private, and charity based that comes under religious centres. Currently, there are about 365 registered elderly care centres working in the main states of Malaysia, including Sabah and Sarawak, two states of the East Malaysia. Due to the importance of ageing population issues, the present study is conducted to explore the demographics facet of Malaysian’s elderly care centres. The main reason behind that lies on the fact that many of these centres are still labelled as being not well equipped and lacking behind in trained staff, equipment and also suffering from severe financial constraints but some still capable of working on a sustainability basis. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative Research Strategy has been adopted, and 28 centres throughout Malaysia are included in this study. About 18 Operators from different centres and 15 caregivers were interviewed to get the holistic view of ageing care and facilities in their respective centres. Findings The results highlight that the majority of centres are not receiving any financial help from the government, and few centres are doing small business such as supplying consumable medical and non-medical items and providing renting and rehabilitation centres facilities to sustain. The caregivers are facing issues such as excess workload, less salary, peer conflicts and non-cooperative centre leadership. Originality/value The present study may help to provide useful information to the policymakers, which enables them to formulate the strategies for ageing care centres in Malaysia. As this study provides insight of components that have an impact on the overall wellbeing of elderly care centres, hence, it could help the care services providers to act as a rising star for Malaysian’s social life comfort.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 139-145
Author(s):  
Mengna Li ◽  
Liyun Wu

In order to solve the problem of imbalance resource allocation and service income in the elderly care service industry, this article establishes three service income models in different situations for a single provider and a single integrator while considering the quality as well as government subsidies. The results showed that government subsidies can significantly improve quality efforts and service income with a mutual restriction between quality and service income. Government subsidies would have an impact on the quality, and they are more conducive to the service income of providers. When government subsidies are less than 80% of the service income, the incentive effect is better.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (18) ◽  
pp. 6051
Author(s):  
Daniel Fuentes ◽  
Luís Correia ◽  
Nuno Costa ◽  
Arsénio Reis ◽  
José Ribeiro ◽  
...  

The Portuguese population is aging at an increasing rate, which introduces new problems, particularly in rural areas, where the population is small and widely spread throughout the territory. These people, mostly elderly, have low income and are often isolated and socially excluded. This work researches and proposes an affordable Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)-based solution to monitor the activities of elderly individuals, inside their homes, in a pervasive and non-intrusive way, while preserving their privacy. The solution uses a set of low-cost IoT sensor devices, computer vision algorithms and reasoning rules, to acquire data and recognize the activities performed by a subject inside a home. A conceptual architecture and a functional prototype were developed, the prototype being successfully tested in an environment similar to a real case scenario. The system and the underlying concept can be used as a building block for remote and distributed elderly care services, in which the elderly live autonomously in their homes, but have the attention of a caregiver when needed.


Author(s):  
Susann Porter ◽  
Tuija Muhonen

The aims of this qualitative grounded theory study were to explore how politicians accountable for Swedish elderly care viewed their assignment, their beliefs and knowledge regarding the psychosocial work environment for elderly care employees, the factors affecting their work environment, and how these politicians regarded elderly care during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study consisted of 41 interviews with politicians in municipalities across Sweden. Three categories emerged from the analysis: (1) interpretation of the assignment directs the focus; (2) recognizing shortfalls in the employees’ work environment; and (3) exposing deficiencies due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The strongest category was identified as interpretation of the assignment directs the focus and was described as the delivery of good and quality care. Nevertheless, this study highlights shortfalls in the delivery of care services where the employees’ work environment, especially in the home care sector, was frequently described as stressful. The COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected the work situation for staff in elderly care. In that setting, staff shortage and lack of competency were common. Nurses were particularly affected by high workload and responsibility. Further research should explore civil servant roles in the elderly care sector and how these actors view their collaboration with municipality politicians.


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