Analysing the effectiveness of pervasive technologies adopted for health monitoring solutions

Abstract

The increase in life expectancy of the average European, brings about many challenges related to health. Elderly people tend to develop more illnesses, such as the loss of cognitive abilities (dementia), as the population’s average age increases. This indicates that more people will be dependent on care and attention from relatives or caregivers. Such dependency can have several impacts on families due to added responsibilities, from a financial and emotional perspective.

Our study will be focusing on Patients with Dementia (PwD) residing in a long-term care nursing home in Malta, entitled ‘St. Vincent de Paule’. Many challenges arise in care homes catering specifically for PwD, such as emotional burden and physical strain on their caregivers. Due to the symptoms that PwD suffer, such as agitation, anxiousness, aimless pacing and loss of memory, patients tend to wander haphazardly. This wandering is potentially very dangerous, as there are possibilities of patients escaping wards, ingesting inappropriate things, falling or causing severe injuries.

Therefore, we will be evaluating pervasive technologies that can be adopted to capture the presence and physiological data of patients, as well as complementing the caregiver’s work and mitigating such dangers, via the logging of any patient observations, to eventually build a history. Dangers affecting PwD were identified through personal and group interviews, as well as field observation sessions. The appropriateness of adequate technologies to address these dangers was then statistically analysed. The research concludes that the participants had positive reactions to the chosen technologies, and that they can be of benefit to the identified scenarios, to mitigate dangers and help in the decision making of management.