E-Health keeps Seniors at Home

Carleton University engineering Ph.D. students have teamed up with doctors and nurses at Elisabeth Bruyere Hospital in Ottowa to conduct a study using electronic commerce to monitor elderly patients in their homes.

The aim of the study is to use technology to detect health issues before they become emergencies that require hospital treatment, thus enabling the elderly to remain longer in their homes rather than having to go to nursing facilities.

Pressure-sensitive sensors are used to collect data about each patient as they go about their daily lives. Sensors on the refrigerator and oven door, for example, can monitor the patient?s eating habits. Another sensor on the bed mattress can tell medical personnel whether the person is having a good night?s sleep or is tossing (a side effect of some medicines). It can tell whether they often get up to use the bathroom in the night (a possible indication of diabetes) or even whether they have lost weight.

The sensors can detect the beginnings of a hip problem if the patient starts habitually pressing harder on the bed with one hand. This kind of data is invaluable as a preventative to a fall, alerting family members to the problem before it becomes severe.

Researchers hope to be able to eventually install sensors in seniors' homes throughout the region and use high-speed Internet connections to send the data to a central monitoring location. They advocate a multimedia approach that allows people to be reached on their device of choice (computer, PDA, mobile) on the access network of choice (wired, cellular, Wi-Fi etc.).

They also hope to set up a community team that includes medical staff, technical personnel and the elderly. While it is anticipated that the majority of data interpretation from the home-based sensors will need to be automated, ultimately medical staff still need to be available to assist in the monitoring process.