Using a Smartphone as a Track and Fall Detector

This chapter proposes a smartphone-based system for both indoor and outdoor monitoring of people with dementia. The whole system comprises wandering detection, safety-zone monitoring, fall detection, communication services, alert notifications, and emergency medical services. To effectively track the elderly, the proposed system uses a smartphone camera to take real-time pictures along the user's path as he or she moves about. Those photos, accompanied with time and GPS signals, are delivered to and stored on the Cloud system. When necessary, family caregivers can download those data to quickly find a way to help the elderly individual. Additionally, this study uses tri-axial accelerometers to examine falls. To assure individuals' data is safeguarded appropriately, an RSA method has been adopted by the system to encrypt stored data. This reliable and minimally intrusive system provides people with dementia with an opportunity to maintain their social networks and to improve their quality of lives.

Cloud-Based Monitoring for Patients with Dementia

Demographic changes are resulting in a rapidly growing elderly population with healthcare implications which importantly include dementia, which is a condition that requires long-term support and care to manage the negative behavioural symptoms. In order to optimise the management of healthcare professionals and provide an enhanced quality of life for patients and carers alike, Remote Electronic Health Monitoring forms a crucial role. This requires myriad functions and components to achieve patient monitoring while accommodating the technological, medical, legal, regulatory, ethical, and privacy considerations. The chapter considers the relevant components and functions of the current state-of-the-art to the provision of effective Remote Electronic Health Monitoring. The authors present the background and related research, and then they focus on the technological aspects of Remote Electronic Health Monitoring to which Cloud-Based Systems and the closely related Cloud Service Modules are central. A number of scenarios to illustrate the concepts are discussed in the chapter.

An Autonomous Intelligent System for the Private Outdoors Monitoring of People with Mild Cognitive Impairments

The aim of this chapter is to describe a system for the private outdoor monitoring of patients with Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) and dementia. The system has been designed for patients suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's disease and people suffering from MCI and dementia. Virtually, the system may be applied to any person capable of living autonomously but might get lost whilst doing his/her everyday activities, due to a decrease in their cognitive function. The system uses off-the-shelf smartphones carried by patients to detect abnormal situations and to raise alarms accordingly. The authors describe the system, detail its features, and discuss its utility and relevance both technically and socially.

Service Evolution in Clouds for Dementia Patient Monitoring System Usability Enhancement

The authors present an analysis which concludes that most e-health system are packaged for large-scale access through cloud-based services shared in a real-time service deployment environment. The service, which has already been deployed in the clouds for e-health construction, needs to instantly change itself in order to enhance the usability for the patients, especially for the dementia patient monitoring system. The evolution for the service in cloud-based systems can be driven fundamentally based on the service function improvement, quality of service improvement, and service collaboration improvement, which can greatly enhance the usability of the dementia patient monitoring system and dynamically enlarge the life-cycle of the current service system in clouds without replacing the reusable service components. The quality of service evolution of the dementia patient monitoring system is essential because the system reliability and instant messaging sending ability is needed in the dementia patient monitoring system. The system should be as reliable as possible for its undertaken the people's life and healthy ensure for all those who use the system.

An Internet of Things Governance Architecture with Applications in Healthcare

The astonishing expansion of Internet of Things has opened a lot of opportunities for related domains to employ strategies that were successfully used for the “things” governance. Furthermore, because of the technology blending in the most common household devices and wearable items, it becomes very easy for the computers to sense the surrounding environment and to collect information about the inhabitants, therefore transforming the intelligent house in a Home Care System (HCS). For medical conditions like dementia and its associated diseases, it is very convenient to monitor the patients in their living space because the patient will benefit from their home comfort. In addition, the costs for in hospital monitoring will decrease. This chapter proposes an Internet of Things Governance Architecture that can be used to sustain and monitor a complex e-health system, with application especially for patients with dementia and its associated diseases.

Employing Opportunistic Networks in Dementia Patient Monitoring

By 2050, 135.5 million people will suffer from dementia worldwide. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies can help dementia patients enjoy an independent life. In particular, communication is vital to any AAL system. Opportunistic networking uses low-cost wearable devices to exchange packets at a close range in cases where there is limited or no infrastructure. In this chapter, the authors propose and describe an autonomous patient monitoring support system based on opportunistic communication. The monitored patient wears non-intrusive sensors, computing devices and actuators, forming a Body Area Network (BAN). The BAN can provide memory impairment support services for the patient and is used to construct personalized condition-monitoring patient models to evaluate against a set of potential life-threatening events. The authors present two data transfer algorithms and show that they are able to offer good hit rates while decreasing congestion and overhead when compared to other existing solutions.

Intelligently Adaptive Mobile Interfaces for Older People

Computer technology has been reported to pose significant usability problems for older users. Further usability problems have been encountered with small, mobile computing devices due to their size as well as age-related declines. This chapter focuses on the usability of mobile computing devices for older people by first employing target users in a study to establish the problems to be addressed when using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). The development of an intelligent mobile interface companion called MemorLane to support older people by adapting its presentation and multimodal output of life-cached data to address individual user preferences and physical abilities is then presented, followed by the results of a detailed user-centred evaluation with further target users. Results show that the adaptability to individual requirements and preferences leads to statistically significant improvements both in the usability of the mobile interface and in the levels of user satisfaction experienced.

Fostering Independent Living in the Aging Population through Proactive Paging

Contemporary societies are facing a dramatic, pervasive increase in age-related cognitive impairment, such as dementia. Dementia is characterized by a slow and progressive decline of declarative memory and cognitive abilities resulting from various pathological conditions that cause brain cell damage. As a consequence of cognitive decline, demented people lose their independence and their capacity to live autonomously. Cognitive impairment is the largest cause of dependence worldwide, and about half of all people with dementia depend upon personal care to carry out daily activities and represent a significant cost for healthcare systems. The ability to remember to carry out planned daily activities at the appropriate temporal and spatial conditions (i.e. prospective memory) is indeed a significantly and consistently compromised cognitive function in demented people, and possibly also in elderly people who complain of a reduced intellectual efficiency but who are otherwise cognitively and neurologically unaffected. An efficient prospective memory capacity is fundamental to preserve independence and autonomy in daily life, to preserve social relations within the community, and to comply with own health needs. The project presented in this chapter aims at fostering independence and autonomy in elderly people without or with early clinical signs of dementia by improving their working memory and prospective memory capacity through the adoption of assistive smartphone technology. From a technological point of view, the project aims at leveraging the recent developments in mobile and context-aware computing to be able to provide “smart” suggestions to individuals by automatically analysing their environment and recognizing locations and time frames that are well suited to the completion of user's tasks. In this chapter, the authors describe the social, clinical, and economic motivations of the project and its technological development.

NoSQL Technologies for Real Time (Patient) Monitoring

Today we witness a growing change in how public health administration thinks about medical data. We have slowly moved from paper-based patient records to digitally storing medical data, in support for advanced evidence-based mining and decision support processes. With this change comes great responsibility, among which efficient storing and accessing the health status of the patient is particularly important. In this chapter, the authors analyze current storage technologies for storing medical data. We are witnessing a shift from traditional relational database support to NoSQL technologies capable of offering great availability and scalability options, and back to the mixture between the SQL and NoSQL worlds, and scalable SQL databases. All these alternatives come with their own pros and cons, which the authors carefully analyze. They believe that their survey will help medical practitioners and developers of health applications make a more informed decision when designing medical data storage support.

Emerging Technologies for Dementia Patient Monitoring

In this chapter, the author explores the available technologies that can enhance the Quality of Life of individuals with dementia. He investigates the foundations of telemetry, different sensor technologies, Context-Aware Systems, and the use of the Internet of Thing in supporting those to live an independent life. The author reviews the use of Smart Homes in supporting individuals with dementia. He then discusses the role of social networking sites in keeping this group connected. In addition to that, the author examines the use of Global Poisoning System (GPS) technology in management of wandering behaviour and the possible use of the currently available technologies in the detection, diagnosing the cause, assessing the response to treatment, as well as prevention of Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms in Dementia (BPSD). This is followed by a brief discussion of the acceptability and the ethical issues that surround the use of these technologies.