A New System to Assist Elders' Self-Care and Their Informal Caregivers

Introduction

In the last years, a noticeable demographic change has been felt worldwide: in many countries, official statistics data show that the population is aging (Boll & Brune, 2016; Kuo, Wang, & Chen, 2016; Macis, Loi, & Raffo, 2016; Mostaghel, 2016; Sendra, Granell, Lloret, & Rodrigues, 2014), which leads to a tremendous increase of elderly care costs (Mostaghel, 2016). This situation poses several challenges to our society, and the topics of independence for the elderly become a critical situation (Kurz et al., 2014) increasingly, raising the need of ensuring multidisciplinary nursing teams, but also solutions that promote the potential of each dependent's autonomy. The goal is, therefore, improving elders’ lifestyle quality in their home settings since older adults prefer to age in place, as well as their informal caregiver's welfare (Mostaghel, 2016), (Beer & Takayama, 2011).

To deal with those major challenges, the scientific community has suggested applying health information and communication technology (ICT) to provide solutions to current issues associated with an aging population (Campos et al., 2016), particularly for the remote monitoring of seniors, which has been advocated as a concept that can radically transform and improve the delivery of healthcare (Bardhan & Thouin, 2013; Buntin, Burke, Hoaglin, & Blumenthal, 2011; Cresswell & Sheikh, 2015; Lee, McCullough, & Town, 2013; Zhang et al., 2013). Advantages linked with health ICT include maintaining older adults’ independence, reducing healthcare needs and costs, providing remote assistance, and promoting social interaction (Beer & Takayama, 2011).

In this manuscript, the design and development of an archetype of a new system to support elders’ self-care and their informal caregivers is proposed, which main objectives are to accompany, teach, and share information between its users, taking into account safe medical validation (reliable information) and ethical issues. The novelty of this project lies in trying to fulfil the current lack of communication strategies to support the remote assistance by Portuguese nursing homes to the elderly and their informal caregivers using emerging technologies. Therefore, the research team firmly believes that rooting technological innovation into elders’ home care is an answer to support their self-care, but also to prevent their dependence and, thus, support older adults’ independence in a home context. On the other hand, the system will be a reinforcement to deal with seniors’ well-being and health and informal caregivers’ welfare by improving their lifestyle quality and promoting social interaction. Nonetheless, it is important to note that its goal will never be to replace any nursing services completely.

Regarding the structure of this document, Section “Background” is related to the research area of this project. After that, Section “Selected Technologies and their Main Advantages” presents a brief description of each technology chosen to develop the proposed system, as well as their main advantages. Section “Research Strategies” gives a brief description of the main research strategies selected to conduct this study. Then, Section “Results and Discussion” presents the results already achieved regarding the design and development of a new system to assist elders’ self-care and their informal caregivers, which are subsequently discussed in the same section. In Section “Conclusion and Future Work”, the conclusion and future work conclude this manuscript briefly.