Long-term care: how to improve the quality of life with mobile and e-health services

摘要

In the last decade, ageing has become a worldwide increasing phenomenon leading to an increased need for specialised help. Continuous monitoring, training and rehabilitation improve the quality of life of older adults and discard the risk of depression and social isolation. To this end, the use of mobile and e-health personalised services at home and in residential long-term care facilities can help to stabilise the health conditions of the subjects, in terms of physical, mental, and social capabilities. In this context, we propose a set of personalised monitoring and rehabilitation services based on mobile, wearable, free contact, and touch screen technologies designed to provide an integrated care and monitoring programme for elderly frail subjects. We evaluated the proposed solutions by deploying the services in a nursing home in Italy and defined customised protocols to involve both guests (primary users) and nursing care personnel (secondary users). In this paper, we present technical details of the proposed solutions and the results obtained by the recently conducted surveys on the Quality of Experience and user acceptance of both user categories after 4 months from the deployment.