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Session: Poster session II
Session starts: Thursday 24 January, 16:00

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Jan-Willem van 't Klooster (Universiteit Twente)
Bert-Jan van Beijnum (Universiteit Twente)
Hermie Hermens (Universiteit Twente)

Abstract:
This article presents lessons learned from a longitudinal pilot study in which 6 elderly clients in a nursing home used a personalized care system to increase self-management. The aging population is an omnipresent problem in western countries. For economical and demographical reasons, it becomes necessary to put nursing home clients more into a self-mana-gement position, using ICT to support them in their daily life and only call for professional aid in case of necessity. Clearly, electronic care services can contribute to this desire but in general they are expensive, they are not well integrated and not well tailored to specific needs [1]. Hence we currently integrate and personalize care services by means of development and testing of a middleware care services platform, integrating services from multiple vendors. Based on stakeholder discussions and interviews, we included remote monitoring of vital signs, medication guidance and dispense, and social services related to communication and activity management. The high-level architecture of the care platform is presented in Fig. 1. It is used as follows: caregivers set personalized care plans relevant to the elderly’s personal situation in the tailoring interface. E.g.; measure blood pressure daily, and if the values exceed a set limit, warn a nurse. The personalised service plans are submitted to the Integration tier. They are stored and executed by orchestrating all necessary plan parts. If the execution of a plan needs external service building blocks (such as sensors), they are available through a set of Adapters. It is not always the case that a plan outcome is known in full at design time. For example, if a plan defines that an alert should only be sent if a measurement value exceeds a limit, this should be reasoned at runtime. Hence, a reasoning component judges actual activity within the system. The Telecare system finally provides the application services defined in the service plan to the end user. At the top, Fig. 1 shows a possible set of combined devices integrated by the platform. 4 Caregivers and 6 clients (82 ± 12 yr.) in nursing homes received training instruction and then used the system for 3 months. Clients had to perform self-measurements, which shifted work-load from caregivers to clients themselves. Appreciation of this by some clients was that this eliminated waiting time and resulted in better overview. However, other clients had learning problems operating the devices without assistance. For social services, memorizing clients on activities in a personalized way is now possible. Interaction through the telecare system alongside face-to-face contact was not only used between client and family, but also between clients and nurses. General acceptance as per the CSCQ [2] is shown in Table 1. Interestingly, employees are more satisfied because of them better being able to operate, understand and judge the new system.