In-Home Assessment of the Activities of Daily Living of the Elderly

In-home health assessment of elders is often accomplished with the help of caregivers, usually family and friends. When formal support is necessary, it is commonly provided by case managers, professionals who visit the home to assess the mental and physical status of the elder, or “client.” In an effort to understand how ADLs are collected, we performed semi-structured interviews with five case managers who maintain a combined caseload of over 150 clients. In this position paper, we discuss the results of those interviews, focusing on the utility of an automatic in-home monitoring system. We discuss how some current research could be influenced by our results and describe the next phase of our study.