Evolving Concepts for Use of Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering for Cardiac Regeneration

The incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in adults are increasing worldwide with impaired repair mechanisms, leading to tissue and organ failure. With the current advancements, life expectancy has improved and has led to search for new treatment strategies that improves tissue regeneration. Recently, stem cell therapy and tissue engineering has captured the attention of clinicians, scientists, and patients as alternative treatment options. The overall clinical experience of these suggests that they can be safely used in the right clinical setting. Ultimately, large outcome trials will have to be conducted to assess their efficacy. Clinical trials have to be carefully designed and patient safety must remain the key concern. At the same time, continued basic research is required to understand the underlying mechanism of cell-based therapies and cell tissue interactions. This chapter reviews the evolving paradigm of stem cell therapy and tissue engineering approaches for clinical application and explores its implications.

Wired and Wireless Distributed e-Home Healthcare System

The proactive development in electronic health (e-health) has introduced seemingly endless number of applications such as telemedicine, electronic records, healthcare score cards, healthcare monitoring etc. Yet, these applications confront the key challenges of network dependence and medical personnel necessity, which hinders the development of universality of e-health services. To mitigate such key challenges, this chapter presents a versatile wired and wireless distributed e-home healthcare system. By exploiting the benefit of body sensor network and information communication technology, the dedicated system model methodically integrates some of the comprehensive functions such as pervasive health monitoring, remote healthcare data access, point-of-care signal interpretation and diagnosis, disease-driven uplink update and synchronization (UUS) scheme and emergency management to design a complete and independent e-home healthcare system.

Supporting Active and Healthy Aging with Advanced Robotics Integrated in Smart Environment

The technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is the integration of service robotics for optimising social services and improving quality of life of the elderly population. This chapter aims to underline the barriers of the state of the art, furthermore the authors present their concrete experiences to overcome these barriers gained at the RoboTown Living Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna within past and current projects. They analyse and discuss the results in order to give recommendations based on their experiences. Furthermore, this work highlights the trend of development from stand-alone solutions to cloud computing architecture, describing the future research directions.

Ventricular Assist Device and Its Necessity for Elderly Population

Ventricular Assist Device (VAD) is considered to be the part and parcel to those people who have cardiac complications or heart failure especially the aged patients. Although VADs have contributed remarkably for the past few years, yet these devices possess some limitations, mainly the driveline infections. Due to these conditions, researchers are aiming to improve its functionality as well as other necessary/additional features and hence there is a need to develop the ‘next generation' wireless VAD system which could be very effective to reduce the risk of this infection. In this chapter, the necessity of the VAD and different kinds of VADs are presented and discussed. These features incorporate hemodynamic states after receiving the VADs, selection of biomaterials for the VAD system, VAD pumps and its classifications. Finally, a brief discussion is also provided based on the recent advancement of the VAD system and the scope for the future research.

Finding a Smart Technical System for Mitigating the Elderly's Driving Accidents

Driving-related injuries associated with elderly drivers are on the rise although the overall rate of driving-related injuries has decreased. To determine the causes of this trend, this chapter introduces the characteristics of the elderly's aging health conditions and driving behaviours, and also explains existing vehicle systems that use different safety technologies to promote safe driving. This chapter will show that for the most part, current systems are not created by people with driving difficulties caused by health problems, which in turn often afflict the elderly. Moreover, based on an elderly focus group with declining body conditions, this chapter uses an interview to discover the problems they encounter while driving and demonstrates how new system concepts can be developed for the elderly. Finally, this chapter proposes adequate system concepts for the elderly as a solution that would improve driving safety and provide a more enjoyable driving environment for this population.

Empowering Patients in Self-Management of Parkinson's Disease through Cooperative ICT Systems

The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the technical feasibility and medical effectiveness of personalised services and care programmes for Parkinson's disease, based on the combination of mHealth applications, cooperative ICTs, cloud technologies and wearable integrated devices, which empower patients to manage their health and disease in cooperation with their formal and informal caregivers, and with professional medical staff across different care settings, such as hospital and home. The presented service revolves around the use of two wearable inertial sensors, i.e. SensFoot and SensHand, for measuring foot and hand performance in the MDS-UPDRS III motor exercises. The devices were tested in medical settings with eight patients, eight hyposmic subjects and eight healthy controls, and the results demonstrated that this approach allows quantitative metrics for objective evaluation to be measured, in order to identify pre-motor/pre-clinical diagnosis and to provide a complete service of tele-health with remote control provided by cloud technologies.

Computer Aided Diagnosis System for Breast Cancer Detection

Management of breast cancer in elder patients is challenging due to a lack of good quality evidence regarding the role of adjuvant chemotherapy. Mammograms can depict most of the significant changes of breast disease. The primary radiographic signs of breast cancer are masses (its density, site, shape, borders), spicular lesions and calcification content. The basic idea is to convert the mammogram image and convert into 3-D matrix. Obtained matrix is used to convert the mammogram into binary image. Several techniques like detecting cell, filling gaps, dilating gaps, removing border, smoothing the objects, finding structures & extracting large objects have been used. Finally finding the granulometry of tissues in an Image without explicitly segmenting (detecting) each object. Compared to existing multiscale enhancement approaches, images processed with this method appear more familiar to radiologists and naturally close to the original mammogram.

Parkinson's Disease Detection with Gait Recognition using Soft Computing Techniques

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system which occurs as a result of dopamine loss, a chemical mediator that is responsible for body's ability to control the movements. It's a very common disease among elder population effecting approx 6.3 million people worldwide across all genders, races and cultures. In this chapter, authors have proposed an automated classification system based on Artificial Neural Network using Feed Forward Back-propagation Algorithm for Parkinson's disease diagnosis by analyzing gait of a person. The system is trained, tested and validated by a gait dataset consisting data of Parkinson's disease patients and healthy persons. The system is evaluated based on several measuring parameters like sensitivity, specificity, and classification accuracy. For the proposed system observed classification accuracy is 97.11% using 19 features of gait, and 95.55% using 10 prominent features of gait selected by Genetic Algorithm.

ICT-Enabled Communication Tools for the Elderly

Elderly population is growing all over the globe. Social life (social contact, social support, social participation) and communication are important factors for ageing well. Research has shown the potential benefit of ICT-enabled communication tools and social networks for the elderly. The number of elderly people appearing on social networks is increasing. However, not all the available tools are effective for the elderly users. In this chapter, authors propose a communication model for the elderly. Focusing mainly on the locality of the users, a social communication tool for the elderly is proposed which is built around six main features: proximity, proactivity, less content more contact, visual map-based interface, gamification of support, and personal assistant.

User-Centered Design of Wearable Assistive Devices for the Aging Population

Due to modern medicine, the lifespan of the average person is increasing, with a concomitant increase in the need for care. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, DeStatis, there will be a deficit of 260,000 caregivers by 2025, which is not only an issue in Germany, but worldwide. New technologies, including wearable devices, will be crucial to manage this challenge, but there is a huge amount of research and investment required to incorporate wearable assistive devices into the lives of elderly users. It is crucially important that any new devices are fit for purpose, taking into account the specific needs of elderly people. This chapter, therefore, summarises and reviews the current state of wearable assistive devices, formalises the current design practice with respect to user needs, and presents design considerations such as wearability and usability, in order to assist in the future development of wearable assistive devices for the aging population.