In one of the latest post, we wrote about our belief, that IT solutions could help seniors to live a happy and comfortable life. We also promised to go over, what kind of solutions and technologies are ready to use for this purpose. So, let’s start right away!

Wearable fitness devices

As components are becoming smaller and cheaper, mainstream fitness bands and watches incorporate a dozen sensors, so can monitor sleep patterns, heart rate and yes even blood pressure more affordable. The simplest fitness devices are only watching essential activities, like walking, running, sleeping, so choose carefully which fitness band to buy. They are easy to use, relatively cheap to buy.

These devices measure blood pressure at the wrist. According to the American Heart Association, their measurement is usually higher and less accurate than those taken at your upper arm. However, having blood pressure and heart rate data for a more extended period can give reassurance that everything is OK, or in contrary, pinpoint to a hidden anomaly, which needs closer attention from a medical professional.

Gramma phones

Shocking as it might be in today’s smartphone-centric world, not everyone needs a cell phone with the latest, multi-touch gestures, app stores or a constant stream of social media feeds. For seniors, sometimes a phone needs to be a device that can make and receive calls. The good news is that several mobiles exist today that are focused on the senior citizen community, I call them gramma phones. They have large buttons, emergency dialing, and easy-to-access speed dial functions. Also, there are a few devices designed primarily for seniors, always online and continually monitoring their users, de facto functioning as location trackers.

Fall detectors

Companies also offer fall detectors: these devices can be worn like watches, they usually have a help call button and an automatic fall detector, which triggers the impact of a fall. An integrated panic button offers help in emergency situations – a 24/7 call center is on standby to receive these calls or alarms.

Devices enhancing sense organs

Older adults usually have difficulty hearing and seeing things; their senses deteriorate gradually. There are a bunch of hearing aids, a lot of them specialized: for instance, one helps people hear the television clearly without turning up the volume. In the field of vision, solutions are scarce, and the best ones are more than 700 years old: glasses. That’s a niche market, with lots of potentials.

Location tracking devices

People with Alzheimer’s and seniors with dementia tend to forget where their home is and sometimes they wander off from places they are supposed to be. A company developed smart shoes that help patients find the way home. With the help of a smart wearable device, a ‘safe zone,’ an area that is trusted enough for a senior person to travel comfortably, can be established. If the person moves outside the zone, caregivers are alerted.

Author: Zoltan Mathe

During a holiday, I visited a nearly 500-year-old pharmacy – located in Kolozsvár, Transylvania. This facility today is a museum and gives us a glimpse what healing meant in those days. Medication covered in gold leaves, powders and substances of unknown origin (to us), oddly shaped glass vessels, laboratory instruments, old pharmacy furniture, recipes of long-forgotten drugs, medieval officinal stamps – everything that was used daily. Alchemistry was closely related to pharmacology, no wonder that the periodical table of alchemist’s elements was on display. It felt strange and chilling at the same time to witness a glimpse of this history.

Let’s fast forward from our days 50 years into the future. AR and VR technology is commonly used to visualize internal organs, to make a better diagnosis. Imaging technologies yet to be developed offer a colorful 3D scan of our body, composed layer by layer, so every tissue and bone could be examined rigorously. Personal medical data is gathered with the help of built-in implants; data is uploaded every second into the cloud. If data readings forecast a possible emergency, the patient is directed to the nearest medical robot, where urgent care is provided.

Medical students are learning in full virtual environments, where emergency situations, rare and contagious illnesses are experienced first-hand. Doctors are using a myriad of IT tools and analyzing the daily personal health data of the patient, providing lightning-fast analytics. Surgery is performed every day in remote villages – with the help of telerobots installed virtually in every place where humans live. Healthcare professionals have enough time to focus on challenging cases.

Nurses are partially replaced by artificial intelligence systems, which fill out the necessary paperwork, order supplies and churn out data upon request. They can focus on the human side of caring, interacting more with patients, spending quality time with them.

This digital transformation is happening now. Technology is coming, whether we like it or not. It is up to us to be prepared, to embrace best practices, and to build in proved technologies into our daily praxis. Doctors are becoming skilled IT professionals to serve better their patients living in the digital world. Doctors must become IT professionals to understand what technologies can be easily integrated, what areas are more likely to become automated and where the human touch is needed.

Not just the medical profession, medical education is also changed by IT. A school in the US is providing specialized training, using engineering principles to the teaching of medicine, bringing analytics and problem-based learning to every aspect of the curriculum. Rather than going to medical school to learn about the human cardiovascular system and engineering school to learn about fluid dynamics, here students will learn about both at once. Every course will have three instructors, to cover the biological science, clinical applications, and engineering aspects of the topic. So to make the leap from passive IT technology consumers to active enablers of the change.

Author: Laszlo Varga

In our case, this power translates to preventive health. As I always say, if meticulously collected medical data is available, then it is only a matter of imagination the results derived from it.

I stumbled across a study in the prestigious Nature magazine that justifies my theory, that data collected with the help of health IT devices is the starting point of personalized, precision medicine.

In this study, based on an examination of 1002 healthy individuals, where healthy means “able to work,” researchers searched for digital phenotypes associated with stress. Physiological signals are a reliable indicator of it, but a large-scale validation is lacking. In this study subject were middle-aged, white collar workers, from technology oriented, finance and public companies. Researchers registered data for five consecutive days over the span of two years.

Subjects received two wearable devices from the scientists: a chest patch to measure the electrocardiogram and acceleration, a wristband to monitor skin conductance, skin temperature, and acceleration. In the study, they also collected smartphone sensor data: location, movement, SMS, call, mail logs, phone usage, audio, environmental sensors. The earlier small-scale study suggested that physiological responses to stress tend to be person-dependent.

Based on a data-driven approach, the study identified digital phenotypes characterized by self-reported poor health indicators and high depression, anxiety and stress scores that are associated with blunted physiological responses to stress.

The results of this study provide a baseline for large-scale ambulatory population monitoring to uncover blunted physiological responses to stress. Furthermore, these findings have important implications related to stress modeling strategies, indicating that stress detection models should be tailored to phenotypes by including multi-sensor data sources, as subjects with different physiological responses to stress, display different health statuses.

This study exemplifies how large-scale, data-driven analytics can be used to derive digital phenotypes and generate new insights into stress detection and disease interception in general. Continuous stress detection will form the basis to enable highly personalized, just-in-time interventions for preventive health — just the problems, here at NETIS are working on.

Author: Laszlo Varga

Automation, wearable tech and integration in dementia care helps carers to focus on face-to-face human interactions.

Across Europe, populations are ageing and with that, cognitive impairment is becoming a serious issue. The number of people suffering from dementia is rising rapidly: in 2015, almost 47 million people worldwide had been diagnosed. By 2050, that number is expected to be 132 million. The World Health Organization says it is one of the biggest public health challenges we face.

That figure alone presents difficulties for healthcare professionals, but the challenge is compounded by financial pressures and rising expectations of quality. Care for those with dementia, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, has evolved and healthcare plans must be increasingly tailored and patient-centric.

However, instead of being allocated more resources, clinicians are often asked to deliver more for less, which is why we must continue to innovate, and turn to technological solutions. We see technology as a key pillar for the delivery of care that empowers dementia sufferers, involves them in the delivery of their own care, and allows them to stay independent in their own homes for longer.

Advances in automation, wearable tech and integration are can help us to reduce duplication, involve the right person at the right time, and allow increasingly precious face-to-face time to spent in the way that best meet each person’s specific needs.

A new era of patient-centric care

The importance of autonomy and quality of life for people with dementia is increasingly recognised. Patients want independence, especially in the early stages of their condition. We know how important it is that individuals stay in their own homes for as long as possible. Advances in wearable and in-home tools mean that risks can be managed in a cost effective and non-intrusive way, freeing up resources to be used elsewhere.

We are also able to unlock collaboration opportunities through better data recording and sharing. Throughout treatment, a dementia patient will engage with many agencies and clinicians – often simultaneously. Duplication in the system is not only expensive, it detracts from quality. By making data collection easy or automatic and by creating systems that intelligently automate the distribution of information, duplication can be avoided and intervention can become better targeted, increasing productivity and value creation.

Alongside collaboration, the dramatic increase in data points created by automated technology means that care plans can be tailored to individual needs in a much more meaningful way. Once in place, technological solutions are able to generate precise, relevant data at very low cost and even perform simple analysis to inform decision makers and warn of problems early.

Radical innovation for patients and caregivers

Advances in simple, effective IT technology is making a fully integrated care system realistic. For patients with cognitive impairment, linking their own experiences with those of their families, caregivers and healthcare professionals can significantly improve quality of life.

Especially when an individual engages with primary care, nursing homes, hospitals and other clinical settings while living and being visited at home, developing methods to record and analyse data centrally can unlock opportunities for joined-up thinking. If everyone involved – including the individual and their families – are able to see the full picture, better decisions can be made and resources can be used in ways that create the most value.

While European healthcare systems are facing growing challenges as the needs of citizens’ change, technology is opening new doors. When well-designed and well-implemented, care that is smarter, more proactive and more cost effective can be delivered – simultaneously meeting the needs and demands of patients, families and clinicians.

We at Netis work on integrated solutions which cover patient monitoring, data analysis as well as direct services for patients, caregivers and health professionals. Meet us at Dementia Care and Nursing Home Expo 2019 (Stand D971) to get the most out of available technology for integrated care.

Author: Eva Lajko

A whole new industry is emerging: gamification is promising us younger brains and dementia prevention. We tested gamification in the ICT4life project, where NETIS is a proud member.

My retired father is an avid lover of crosswords, but since I gave him my old iPad, he discovered a new way of keeping his 74 years old brain entertained: online card games. He plays one or two hours a day, aside from his usual walk and his part-time job as a driver. So, I can honestly say, he does everything in his power to keep himself young.

He is not the only one to use games to keep his brain young, and a whole new industry called gamification knows this. Apps and games for our mental health and well-being are popping up daily: some offer brain exercises for free, others require a subscription to keep the entertainment alive. Not only computer or tablet games but also smart TV-s offer us little puzzles, brain trainers and games. So, there is no excuse: we need to play to stay young.

There is a plethora of scientific data, that backs up this common belief and experience, that crosswords, puzzles, games can keep our mind fit and young, and also significantly lowers the risk of dementia. The latest study in this field was conducted by Dr. Karlene Ball, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Dr. Dan Roenker, of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, and result were recently published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions.

In this study – that followed more than 2800 older adults for a decade – a brain training method known as the speed of process training reduced participants’ dementia by 29 percent. This kind of training involves a task that aims to improve the user’s visual attention – the speed and accuracy a person can identify and remember objects in front of them. In this particular study, researchers developed a game where the user is asked to spot an object, such a house, in center of their gaze while also identifying an object in their peripheral vision, such a dog. As the game advances user has less and less time to spot each object and more distractors are added to the screen. We use one speed of process training game in our innovation award nominated EU project, ICT4Life, a memory game, Find the Pairs, which is accessed via a SMART TV. The preliminary results suggest that this computer application can be used to assess the different areas of cognitive functions. You can read more about these result on the official ICT4Life website.

So please play, stay young, and prevent dementia!

Author: Eva Lajko