By Christina Orlovsky, contributor
For many senior citizens, growing older also means taking a step back toward a more dependent lifestyle and relying on children or caregivers to tend to their needs and ensure their safety. Thanks to new research at one Texas university, the next generation of elderly adults may be able to remain safely in their homes, cared for by a new wave of assistive technology.
Thanks to new research, the next generation of elderly adults may be able to remain safely in their homes, cared for by a new wave of assistive technology.
“There are clinical, safety and psychological reasons behind this research focus,” explained Fillia Makedon, department head and professor of computer science and engineering, and the director of the Human Centered Computing Laboratory (HERACLEIA) at the University of Texas, Arlington.
At HERACLEIA, Makedon, her colleagues and their students are developing tools to help seniors remain comfortably at home longer than ever before, with caregivers monitoring them remotely.
“Clinically, professional care today is fragmented and determined by visits to the hospital in order to respond to an emergency or for a planned visit,” she continued. “However the time of clinical assessment of the physical and behavioral status of an individual is extremely short. It doesn’t allow for a systemic evaluation of how, for example, the person responds to drug X under conditions Y or after an event Z. By incorporating sensors and other non-invasive monitoring technologies at certain locations at the patient’s home, one may be able to assess over days or longer how someone’s condition is evolving.”
At HERACLEIA, researchers work in a mock apartment equipped with monitoring technology, robotic tools, cameras and sensors. Highlights of the technology include computer vision methods, which identify human body activity, such as bending, walking, falling or jumping; a tracking system to localize movement; and brain imaging tools to correlate brain changes and connect them to behavioral patterns. Each of these fulfills the goal of protecting the safety of seniors in their home environment.
“The safety reasons behind the research are to monitor behavior in order to prevent falls and other elements of risk,” Makedon explained. “For example, one may identify a better rearrangement of furniture in one’s living space, depending on the pattern of accidents collected.”
The final critical element of the research is the psychological component of aging independently.
“We aim to keep an aged, disabled or any person needing nursing care at home as much as possible,” she continued. “There are psychological benefits to the family or the patient themselves, knowing that there is a ‘caring big brother,’ whether on site or remotely, watching out for them.”
Makedon emphasized that the goal of this assistive technology is not to replace human nursing but to assist it in a way that would be particularly beneficial to nursing professionals.
“Nurses are, like doctors, very busy practitioners who can devote only a fraction of their time to any given person; they cannot possibly have the time to collect valuable long-term information that would allow them to extract important features or changes or behavioral markers that can lead to improved caring,” she said.
“Assistive environments, like the mock HERACLEIA apartment we have in our lab, are test beds to develop new methods that would allow us in the future to improve the caring by nurses and find out, for example, when is the best time to administer a therapy; when is the most critical time that a person faces a given risk; where is the best location for rehabilitation in someone’s home; and how to best reorganize daily routines and train family caregivers to make nursing have more impact,” she concluded. “The same technologies developed for the home can also be developed for the hospital.”
For more information, visit the HERACLEIA Web site
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