98GER-e-TEC: TELEMONITORING PROJECT FOR ELDERLY RESIDENTS IN NURSING HOMES

Abstract

Introduction: Year on year, the number of patients in the emergency departments from nursing homes continues to grow. It is necessary to provide tools to health care teams for these nursing homes, such as assistance in the prevention of decompensation of some geriatric syndromes. Method and Discussion: The aim of the GER-e-TEC™ project is to study the contribution of tele-monitoring residents in nursing homes of Rouen University Hospital, with a structuring and recording of medical care in order to avoid situations of acute decompensation and complication of geriatric risks. The objective of the project is to experiment with recorded personalized medical monitoring of the residents of the Rouen University Hospital nursing homes using the E-care intelligent telemedicine platform. The latter assists caregivers by automating the processing of information from sensors and from questionnaires in order to detect and make an early diagnosis of medical risk situations. E-care will provide personalised care for the main geriatric risks, to avoid the occurrence of an acute decompensation factor in the elderly patient. The information collected will be supplemented by codified therapeutic management, following international recommendations, directly usable in nursing homes. The E-care platform uses an intelligent algorithm to process the data and generate alerts based on medical knowledge of the pathologies treated and modelled by ontologies. The general principle adopted by this platform is the anticipation of decompensation through the detection of warning signs that ultimately lead to hospitalization. The collection of information by the platform will increase knowledge of the patients and provide a particularly effective tool for transmission between nursing staff in nursing homes. This information collection will also allow the extraction of markers to improve the early detection of any decompensation and thus improve patient monitoring and reduce the number of hospitalizations. The platform will also provide any paramedical and medical health professional with the resident's geriatric data, which will be updated regularly, including the anthropometric, nutritional, cognitive and iatrogenic data, constituting a real illustration integrated into the electronic platform of the standardised gerontological evaluation, thanks to simple and non time-consuming measures. Geriatric risks will include the risk of falling, constipation, dehydration, confusion, iatrogenicity, undernutrition, heart failure, diabetes, infections and bedsores.