Maintaining mental wellbeing of elderly at home

Abstract

We describe herein the problem of providing the most cost efficient and effective ways of supporting mental wellbeing as well as methods for physical and mental rehabilitation for elderly at home including a recovery from accidents, particularly concentrating on those impacting brain activities, such as aging-related dementia and stroke, illnesses with very high socio-economic influence. Technologies built in several EU funded projects, e.g. FP7-ICT-StrokeBack, FP7-ICT-ARMOR, Artemis-CHIRON, FP7-SEC-AF3 and other ones, are suitable also for other kinds of health issues, such as recovery from injuries, restoring mobility etc. A common part is stimulating engagement through entertainment, rivalry and “real feeling” of gaming environment, motivating compliance with rehabilitation rules. The automated home system combining progress in ICT and applied clinical know-how allows patients, their direct care providers and family to back the effective use of rehabilitation procedures in their familiar home surroundings instead of unfriendly clinical settings. Our system integrates a set of state of art technologies ranging from augmented/virtual reality gaming, merged with immersive user interfaces for providing mixed reality exercise setting, innovative embedded micro sensor devices with improved power autonomy through use of the newest Bluetooth Smart communication transceivers, combined together into a Personal Health Record (PHR) system supporting the delivery of individual, patient-centred e-health services both at home, at hospital or when mobile. The use of mixed-reality systems, merging interactive virtual components with realistic settings of patient’s home, is linked with multi-modal user interfaces stimulating operation of his/her body to accomplish the objective of the exercise, while self-motivation is inspired by rivalry with oneself and other people. This gears to achieving better individual’s contribution to rehabilitation procedure, leading to attaining meaningfully quicker regaining of one’s earlier abilities. The physiological data is combined with and related to the detected body motion sensing using novel feature extraction and classification procedures handled within a wearable unit, to determine the precision of performed workouts. By using physical intervention only when essential, this disregards expensive human involvement and thus significantly decreases related expenses of Public Health Care services. We start with describing the motivation and needs for such system in Sect. 2, which gives raise to deriving system specifications and architecture as described in Sect. 3. In following Sects. 4 and 5 we described specific technologies developed in our projects, namely Mixed-Reality Rehabilitation Training System integrated into a Personal Health Record (PHR) platform. We then provide the overview of the overall system integrated into a portable unit in Sect. 6, concluding with report on evaluations with users in Sect. 7.