Tele-Physical Examination and Tele-Care Systems for Elderly People

Healthcare is important to people, especially to elderly people who lives independently. Since Internet services are getting reliable and stable, the tele-healthcare systems built on the Internet can be good supports to the traditional home healthcare centres and hospitals. The Internet-based tele-healthcare systems use Internet and specific modules can decrease the healthcare costs for patients and organization; can relieve the health professional shortage (at all levels) and the limit of institutional beds situations; and, can reduce unnecessary medical facility visits as well as examinations. Furthermore, such systems can reduce time costs, for instance, elderly people don't need to travel to the hospitals just for figuring out their health conditions. This research uses state-and-transition graph to analyze and build tele-healthcare system. The state-and-transition graph makes the healthcare process such as the care-giving tasks and status become crystal clear, and the token-based flow can help the care service providers (e.g. healthcare organizations and caregivers) ensure that the correct care services/actions have given at right time as well as avoid the possible mistakes which may be made by caregivers accidentally. With the proposed tele-healthcare system, elderly people can do physical examinations alone at home. The examination data is sent to the tele-healthcare server via Internet for analyzing and the health condition is categorized into different alarm levels. The system then arranges correspondent care services/actions for the elderly people automatically. A pilot has been done in a Care Centre of Elderly People in Taiwan.