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IoT Meets Caregivers: a Healthcare Support System in Assisted Living Facilities 1 Sebastián Aced López * Fulvio Corno Luigi De Russis sebastian.acedlopez@polito.it fulvio.corno@polito.it luigi.derussis@polito.it e-Lite research group - Politecnico di Torino

IoT meets caregivers

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IoT Meets Caregivers: a Healthcare Support System in Assisted Living Facilities

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Sebastián Aced López *

Fulvio Corno

Luigi De Russis

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

e-Lite research group - Politecnico di Torino

Motivation

¤  Improve the quality of life for individuals (elderly or patients) in their own homes.

¤  Support medical staff in structured environments such as hospitals.

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What about caregivers in ALFs?

¤  Often, current Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems:

Assisted Living Facilities (ALFs)

¤  Housing facility for persons with cognitive or physical disabilities.

¤  Unlike hospitals, ALFs do not have full-time medical stuff providing medical treatments to residents.

¤  ALFs ensure:

¤  Health

¤  Safety

¤  Well-being conditions

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The GrAAL project

¤  GrAAL is a monitoring system for ALFs that helps the caregivers in their daily tasks, thus improving the quality of life of both the inhabitants and the staff.

¤  The intended users are the caregivers, no the inhabitants

¤  The activities and needs of the ALF staff are very different from those of the physicians and nurses in hospitals.

Healthcare support system for caregivers in ALFs

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User Requirements Analysis

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¤  Three 90-minutes focus groups in three different ALFs in northern Italy with professional caregivers working for Cooperativa Frassati.

¤  Two of the visited ALFs accommodate people with various degree of mental disorders. The third one houses people with motor impairments.

Participants by age Participants’ Expertise

Details about the visited ALFs

Observations

¤  Caregivers need their hands free to be ready to assist

¤  Caregivers desire to carry on as few “objects” as possible

¤  Avoid to give additional technological tools to the inhabitants

¤  Provide better mechanisms for the inhabitants to require caregivers assistance

¤  Provide the caregivers with better ways of monitoring the inhabitants while these are alone

System Requirements

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¤  Two use cases have been defined for the preliminary implementations:

¤  Assistance request from the inhabitant

¤  Notification of potentially hazardous situation

1.  Detection and notification of potentially hazardous situations

2.  Supporting smart assistance

3.  Determining inhabitants presence in sensitive areas

4.  Support for RAF management aspects

5.  Unobtrusiveness

6.  Hands-free operations

System Design

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¤  The system monitors RAF inhabitants by measuring body signals and environmental conditions to notify caregivers whether and where assistance is needed. It also allows explicit requests from nursing home inhabitants. ¤  Sensors: Environmental and wearable

sensors. Wristwatch form factor. ¤  Middleware: Measures the sensors data

and interprets them. The scope is to point the caregivers attention to “suspicious situations” that might require their presence.

¤  Notification Devices: The devices in which caregivers receive the notifications sent by the middleware. Wearable.

Prototype

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¤  A prototype with reduced functionalities has been realized by extending the Dog gateway capabilities (middleware) and some Texas Instruments eZ430-Chronos watches as both wearable sensors and notification devices.

Preliminary Validation

¤  The preliminary implementation supports the inhabitants request assistance and the caregivers acknowledgement as well as “quick access commands” for the interaction.

¤  The validation has been twofold:

¤  We confirmed the system technical feasibility by in-lab testing.

¤  We assessed the user acceptance and perceived usefulness by distributing a series of questionnaires to a fourth independent group of healthcare assistants.

Participants by age Participants’ Expertise

Conclusions and Future Works

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¤  Through three focus groups, organized with 30 professional caregivers, we have collected a series of user requirements that were translated into system features.

¤  A prototype with reduced functionalities allowed us to determine that exploiting the synergy between wearable/mobile technology and environmental sensing, can fulfill the needs that the caregivers working in ALFs have.

¤  Future works will be expanding the implemented system to effectively detect potentially hazardous situations in an autonomous way, and deploying the complete system in an ALF similar to the ones visited during the Focus Groups phase.

Thank you!

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