Monitoring Health Status in Long Term Care Through the Use of Ambient Technologies and Serious Games

New technologies, such as serious games and ambient activities, are being developed to address problems of under-stimulation, anxiety, and agitation in millions of people living with dementia in long term care homes. Frequent interactions with instrumented versions of these technologies may not only be beneficial for long term care residents, but may also provide a valuable new set of multifaceted data related to the health status of residents over time. In this paper, we develop a model for health monitoring in healthcare environments and we report on two studies that show how medically relevant data can be collected from elderly residents and emergency department patients in an unobtrusive way. The first study shows how data related to cognitive abilities can be collected from elderly emergency department patients and the second study shows how detailed data on a range of factors can be collected from ambient activity units designed to provide engaging interactions for long term care residents. In summary, this paper proposes the use of new technologies to transform long term care from a data poor to a data rich environment, where the health status of long term care residents and elderly patients is more closely monitored.