Remote health care system for elderly people with chronic diseases

Abstract

Chronic diseases are the leading cause of mortality in the world, representing 60% of all deaths. The remote project aims to establish a multidisciplinary and integrated approach to utilize information and communication technolo- gies for addressing real needs of elderly people, especially of citizens at risk due to geographic and social isolation in combination with specific chronic conditions. More specifically, remote offers a set of services oriented to maintain the independence of the persons who face chronic diseases and live alone. remote provides four different kinds of services, related to different areas such as environmental home control, schedule control, mental health and physical health. This paper is focussed on the services related to the physical health. An activity advisor, a nutritional advisor and a medical advisor will be analyzed. All services are based on client-server architecture, compound by the server side and two main clients, one for the elderly and another for the doctors who take care of them. Nowadays, the pilot phase of remote has just started. Remote counts with several pilots, in sites like Norway, Romania, Germany, Israel and Spain in which the elderly participants present different conditions. Also, the pilot sites count with medical doc- tors specialized in different areas, such as nutrition or physiotherapy. This situation allows testing the services in a wide variety of cases. In this paper we will analyze the results achieved so far in the pilot phase.