eHealthPortal: A Social Support Hub for the Active Living of the Elderly

The absolute and relative increases in the number of elderly are evident worldwide, from the most developed countries to the lowest-income regions. The fast demographic transition poses great challenges to the healthcare system and introduces a significant burden to the elderly and their family. To meet the unprecedented challenges of global aging, various aging-in-place (AIP) solutions have been proposed to enable the elderly to live in their own home and community safely, independently and comfortably. Elderly need support in various aspects, such as physical, cognitive, emotional, and social, in their daily life. However, most existing AIP solutions provide support in one or two aspects only and many focus on anomaly detection rather than deliver care or companionship. To better facilitate eldercare at home, we propose eHealthPortal, which is a social support hub for the active living of the elderly. By crowdsourcing help and support from the users' family and friends, caregivers, and doctors, eHealthPortal cares for the wellness of the elderly in all the four aforementioned key aspects. As a novel feature of the system, eHealthPortal is supported by a group of virtual and robotic agents for providing reliable sensing in unobtrusive ways seamlessly, tender caring in a holistic manner proactively, and actual companionship in natural forms constantly.

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