Towards Universal Access to Home Monitoring for Assisted Living Environment

摘要

The improvement of the conditions of daily life at home and work, promoted by the socio-economic progression, best quality private living environments and the immense development in healthcare and biomedical technologies has extended the average age of life beyond 70. According to recent surveys this "population aging" phenomenon will contribute to reach the record number of 1 billion people over 60 years on earth by the year 2020. Due to a variety of reasons such as convenience or a need for security and privacy these elderly people generally prefer to avail healthcare facilities at their home. This is time to break through the physical boundaries of hospitals and bring healthcare facilities to the homes. Wireless and internet-based healthcare devices can play a vital role in this regard given that reliable, individualized systems with user-friendly interfaces are developed to enable elderly people feel comfortable with making use of novel technology. This paper presents a remote home monitoring application called Living Assistant that could be utilized to continuously monitor and control a wide range of electronic appliances and ambient parameters. Basically it has been designed to function as a healthcare aide for elderly patients suffering from restricted mobility or other chronic diseases. The advanced ways of user interfaces presented in this paper are simple, generic and universally applicable. With little customization the application can be used to accommodate other user groups as well.