Assisted technology for daily living

TeleCare The home care service continues to grow as the overall population ages, and as the economic situation requires parents and other adults of the family all out for work and for longer hours. At the same time, Hong Kong, following the global trend, is shifting its care provision more and more from the expensive institutional-based model to the more economical community-based and family-based model. Accidents could happen when the elderly just alone at home and they might not be able to send out help-seeking alerts to their care-givers immediately, which could cause the risk of safety. An activity monitoring system would use various infrared sensors to monitor the activity patterns of the client in a non-obtrusive manner within an apartment. The system would prompt the user for response if certain patterns of vital signs and activities deemed critical appear. The proposed TeleCare technology for iHome would offer to the end-users as a mean to alert their care-providers when they are in certain critical situations. The deliverables would have impacts on the 500,000 elderly in Hong Kong who live singly or pseudosingly (when other family members are all out for work), plus other vulnerable who are staying at home often by themselves, such as people with disabilities and chronic illness, summing to another 500,000 in the territory. Many of them would appreciate some forms of care service in case of emergency. This development facilitates care at home without requiring other family members and careproviders to stay home all the time. A Telecare system has been developed using wireless passive infrared (PIR) motion detectors and a software program of Pattern of Daily Activities (PDA) which was run to collect daily pattern data and used these data to setup the threshold parameters in different areas. Each threshold parameter was also divided into four time zones (for example, mid-night: 00:00-05:59; morning: 06:0011:59; afternoon: 12:00-17:59; evening: 18:00-23:59). These four time zones were defined to match different major activity pattern during a day. In the mid-night period, it covers the sleeping time; in the morning, it covers morning activities; in the afternoon, it may cover the time for taking a nap; in the evening, it covers the activities in the night.