Overnight Supervision of Alzheimer's Disease Patients in Nursing Homes - System Development and Field Trial

The number of patients affected by Alzheimer's disease among the population is currently growing, while the availability of resources for their assistance is decreasing. A solution for this problem is provided by the use of Ambient Assisted Living technologies, with the objectives to prolong the independent living of patients at home, to relieve assistance burden on caregivers, and to improve care effectiveness in nursing homes. This paper describes an integrated system designed to support the work of nurses during the night, to ensure comfort and safety of Alzheimer's disease patients in nursing homes. The project started from a similar solution designed for home use, suitably re-engineered for adoption in nursing homes. The system has been designed according to nurses' requirements and expectations, both by revising some existing functionalities, and by developing new components. The results gained from an experimental trial are also presented and discussed.

[1]  J. Ancker,et al.  The Invisible Work of Personal Health Information Management Among People With Multiple Chronic Conditions: Qualitative Interview Study Among Patients and Providers , 2015, Journal of medical Internet research.

[2]  Gaetano Marrocco,et al.  NIGHT-Care: A Passive RFID System for Remote Monitoring and Control of Overnight Living Environment , 2014, ANT/SEIT.

[3]  J. Ratcliffe,et al.  Quality in residential care from the perspective of people living with dementia: The importance of personhood. , 2016, Archives of gerontology and geriatrics.

[4]  VARUN CHANDOLA,et al.  Anomaly detection: A survey , 2009, CSUR.

[5]  Harriet Finne-Soveri,et al.  Perceived and observed quality of long-term care for residents - Does functional ability account? , 2016, International journal of older people nursing.

[6]  C. T. Lau,et al.  A mobile-health application to detect wandering patterns of elderly people in home environment , 2013, 2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).

[7]  Nuno M. Garcia,et al.  Assistive Technologies for Homecare: Outcomes from Trial Experiences , 2015 .

[8]  Suk-Sun Kim,et al.  Sleep disturbance, nocturnal agitation behaviors, and medical comorbidity in older adults with dementia: relationship to reported caregiver burden. , 2014, Research in gerontological nursing.

[9]  Michael Groody.  The Impact of Emerging Technology , 2000 .

[10]  Carlos Chiatti,et al.  The UP-TECH project, an intervention to support caregivers of Alzheimer’s disease patients in Italy: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial , 2013, Trials.

[11]  Carlos Chiatti,et al.  The UP-TECH project, an intervention to support caregivers of Alzheimer's disease patients in Italy: preliminary findings on recruitment and caregiving burden in the baseline population , 2015, Aging & mental health.

[12]  Dae-Il Chang,et al.  Sleep Disturbances and Predictive Factors in Caregivers of Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Dementia , 2014, Journal of clinical neurology.

[13]  Emily S. Patterson,et al.  Integrating Electronic Health Records into Clinical Workflow , 2014 .

[14]  Diane J. Cook,et al.  Discovering Temporal Features and Relations of Activity Patterns , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops.

[15]  Felicia M Bowens,et al.  Health information technology: integration of clinical workflow into meaningful use of electronic health records. , 2010, Perspectives in health information management.

[16]  Frans Verhey,et al.  Effectiveness of Nonpharmacological Interventions in Delaying the Institutionalization of Patients with Dementia: A Meta‐Analysis , 2008, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

[17]  Emily S. Patterson,et al.  (NISTIR 8042) Integrating Electronic Health Records into Clinical Workflow: An Application of Human Factors Modeling Methods to Specialty Care in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Ophthalmology , 2015 .

[18]  Ling-Hui Chang,et al.  Indicators of perceived useful dementia care assistive technology: Caregivers' perspectives , 2015, Geriatrics & gerontology international.

[19]  Ahmad Lotfi,et al.  Smart homes for the elderly dementia sufferers: identification and prediction of abnormal behaviour , 2012, J. Ambient Intell. Humaniz. Comput..

[20]  Mal Schechter,et al.  Improving the Quality of Care in Nursing Homes , 1987 .