Evaluating Elders' Bio-Psycho-Social Health Dimensions Using Their Smartphones

The percentage of elder people in developed countries is increasing rapidly. A high percentage of them usually present multiple and chronic diseases. A patient with several diseases requires specific and coordinated care that is difficult to configure. Different frameworks can evaluate their functional status and identify the required care, together with the associated cost to the health system. Nevertheless, these frameworks are usually questionnaires that have to be periodically performed by the patients with the assistance of already overloaded professionals. In this chapter, the authors make use of mobile technologies to build a system capable of monitoring the activities of the elderly and analysing these data to assess their bio-psycho-social status. The experiments carried out show us that it correctly evaluates these patients and reduces the effort required by health professionals.

Factors Determining E-Health Readiness by Higher Education Institution Students in an Emerging Country

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are important for improving healthcare services worldwide. Using tools related to ICTs such as smartphones (cell phones), video conferencing, computers enhances the delivery of health services as well as electronic health (e-health). Therefore, this study's main objective is to investigate the e-health readiness for higher education institution students in an emerging country (Botswana). The study achieved this by identifying the readiness factors that affect the adoption of e-health using the conceptual framework (technology readiness and acceptance model for e-health). The study established that students' optimism, innovativeness, discomfort, and insecurity influence e-health perceived ease of use. However, only optimism and discomfort influence e-health perceived usefulness whereas innovativeness and insecurity did not influence e-health perceived usefulness. Additionally, the study found out that e-health perceived usefulness and e-health perceived ease of use have an influence on e-health adoption.

Technology as a Pathway for Older People to Engage in Activities Promoting Successful Ageing

This chapter focuses on the use of technology on older adult health promotion. During the ageing process, they experience changes in physical, cognitive, psychological, and social domains. Frailty is the most problematic expression of ageing and entails a high risk of adverse outcomes. In order to prevent it, healthcare professionals must intervene on health promotion. However, it's impossible to continuously monitor the health status of thousands of people. Technologies can bridge the gap between older people's home and the hospital. Especially those with sensors, allow healthcare professionals to continuously monitor the older people's health status and evaluate the health parameters to prioritize care and alert to necessary behavioral changes. The seniors become more aware and responsible for their health, increasing their literacy, autonomy, and well-being. They become more engaged in activities that promote successful ageing. In this chapter, the authors address one of many research projects that monitor the health parameters of older people in a community setting through wearable sensors.

Resilient Software Architecture Platform for the Individual Care Plan

The individual care plan (ICP) is a metamorphic being. The only steady reality that it maintains is its final objective, stated and explained in the previous chapter where the ICP is thoroughly introduced and debated. It is a fantastic beast, better described as a system of systems that is severely polymorphic due to its coverage both in level of care as well as sources of data to handle. Patient monitoring generates large volumes of data. There is the evident need of an advanced approach that can deal with these huge amounts of healthcare data extracted from various sources such as the wearable sensors, medical, and nursing records that are currently called big data. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and discuss the software platform that is adequate to develop and deploy the system paying attention to the needs of high-availability, sensitive information security; service-level agreements for multiple healthcare interoperability; law and ruling conformance; as well as other technical and ethical aspects.

The Individual Care Plan as Electronic Health Record

The idea of the need for healthcare planning, whether in the individual or collective dimensions, is consensual among all health professionals. Despite this consensus, as well as a discourse that values teamwork, planning focused on health professionals has prevailed. Due to the current circumstances, particularly those resulting from changes in the epidemiological profile of the population, a new way of planning individual healthcare is required that must meet the following criteria: be of an individual nature, integrate the active participation of the citizen/family caregiver, be focused on care in the course of life, safeguard interdisciplinarity, assist in decision making about care, and be able to record decisions about care.

Emotion Identification With Smartphones to Improve the Elder Quality of Life Using Facial Recognition Techniques

The increase in the elderly population today is a fact. This group of people needs day-to-day care due to their age, and, in addition, they often have health problems. Technology can be used to mitigate these problems. However, it must be borne in mind that most of this population is currently unable to get the most out of electronic devices. To help elders benefit from these devices, systems adapted to their needs, and preferences are needed. In particular, systems that use the elders' contextual information to integrate several aspects of eldercare and adapt them to each elder would provide significant benefits. In this case, the emotions will be used to recognize to what extent an elderly person needs care at certain times of the day and to adapt surrounding IoT systems to their needs and moods. For this purpose, this chapter proposes to use smartphones as the devices that centralize contextual information of the elders, focusing on emotion recognition.

Ageing and Health in the Digital Society

This chapter describes the innovative solutions generated by the digital society in the field of health and reflects on the effectiveness of the mechanisms implemented in the last decade to increase the adoption of these solutions by the aged population. This reflection begins with the analysis of the digital divide-related issues, relying on the assumption that the lack of a joint multi-stakeholder effort to reduce existing differences in access to digital resources may result in deepening inequality in health. The opportunities and risks for ageing and health in the digital era are presented considering different healthcare purposes, contexts, and end-users' perspectives. Finally, the recommendations to maximize the impact of strategic actions to increase digital literacy and to reinforce digital engagement are presented.

Integrated Continuous Healthcare Team Computer System Architecture

A computer-based pattern recognition system architecture destined to collect and process geographically referenced data about integrated continuous healthcare teams (ECCI) is presented and discussed in the chapter. These teams are part of Portugal's National Network of Integrated Continuous Care (RNCCI). The system is designed to collect data about the displacement of each team during healthcare assistance. The pattern recognition system handles information about the costs related to the provided healthcare. The architecture is designed around open source software resources. Virtual machines and container-based technologies provide hardware independence. The Python programming language ecosystem is chosen for all the main components of the system.

Contribution of an Intelligent Virtual Assistant to Healthy Ageing in Adults With Type 2 Diabetes

This chapter describes the development of a theory-driven and evidence-based digital intervention to facilitate self-care in older adults with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and, additionally, its contribution to healthy aging and the individual care plan. T2D is highly prevalent in older adults. Difficulties in adopting and maintaining desirable self-care behaviors is associated with lack of glycemic control and subsequent complications, which significantly burden patients, their families, and the health system. The VASelfCare (Virtual Assistant Self-Care) intervention is a software application that provides an interface with a 3D anthropomorphic virtual assistant targeting three key self-care behaviors: medication-taking, physical activity, and a healthy diet. Other VASelfCare elements are intended for nurses providing diabetes consultations, including a web-based back-office with a patient data dashboard, which streamlines integration of care. The application prototype has been co-produced with older adults with T2D, primary care health professionals, and other stakeholders.

Technology to Improve Elderly Nutrition

The ageing of the population is one of the main emerging problems for this century. Knowledge and understanding of the food ideologies and practices of this adult population is a vital issue in health policies and interventions. With the traditional tools and assumptions of ethnographic fieldwork, the research is oriented towards a series of objectives in order to complete the limited knowledge on these issues. Through some of the categories that emerge from the fieldwork, the authors analyze the ideology, practices, and representations on food in the adult population and try to propose some spaces from where technology can work on solutions.