ICT4Life

European Commission
Funding Organization:	European Commission
Funding Programme:	Horizon H2020
Funding Instrument:	Research & Innovation Action
Start Date:	January 1, 2016
Duration:	36 months
Total Budget:	3,423,968 EUR
ITI Budget:	404,375 EUR

ICT services for Life Improvement For the Elderly (2016: H2020 RIA)

With an increasingly growing population in Europe, cognitive impairments is a major social and health issue. According to the World Alzheimer Report (WHO) 2014, dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, remains one of the biggest global public health challenges our generation is facing. People with Dementia, Alzheimer or Parkinson’s disease have a lot of problems to manage alone and require for care. From the caregiver side, relatives are the other victim of the disease. As the impairment increases the families need to dedicate much more time, mental and physical effort. In many cases the carer is the couple who also is an old person with all the associated problems. If this demographic transition is not tackled head-on, it will raise considerable concerns for the financial sustainability of health and care systems.

Over 36 months, ICT4Life will dedicate a large amount in order to develop a solution for individuals with early stage cognitive impairment living alone that will permit doctors and caregivers to extract useful information about patients (for taking the best medical or social actions), while contributing in a user friendly way to extend their independence. People with dementia, in general and, in particular, with Alzheimer at an early stage and with Parkinson, constitute the main group of users ICT4Life will focus its analysis on.

The technologies that will constitute the main pillars of ICT4Life are the following:

Education delivery methods for care professionals. Tools for the automatic creation of reusable resources, i.e. formative training content, etc.
ICT decision support instruments, incorporating machine intelligence, allowing care professionals to have access to treatment/therapy recommendations according to patients’ profile.
Advanced visual analytics to monitor personal health status
Indoors activity recognition through advanced sensing to detect deviations from persons’ daily conduct.
Game-based learning and adaptation tools to boost patient empowerment and self-care abilities.
Integration of unobtrusive biomedical sensors for continuous monitoring of the patient health status and compilation data to be processed and generate new medical knowledge
Design and development of personalised interfaces relying on smart/Connected TV and Android-based/iOS/Windows mobile technologies as interaction mechanism with ICT4Life Teleservices
Standard codification mechanisms to increase levels of integration of clinical and social data from multiple service providers and user-generated data. Electronic Health/Care Record (EHR)
Data mining to accomplish data analytics so that new knowledge about co-morbidities, disease evolution and socio demographic parameters will be generated

Other important contributions from the business point of view that ICT4Life will offer:

Approaches to manage regulatory, security, privacy, liability, confidentiality and interoperability issues (identification, authentication, authorization to access/share health/care records and patient electronic consent)
Mechanisms to reduce risk and time to market costs for industry
Flexible approach to service development so as to give answers to multiple scenarios, such as home based personal services, daily care centre services and elder homes services.
Model business cases to support implementation and scale up

ICT4Life: ICT services for Life Improvement For the Elderly

ICT4Life: Use of sensors for new integrated care services

May 04, 2017

With an increasingly growing population in Europe, cognitive impairments are a major social and public health issue. According to the World Alzheimer Report (WHO) [1], dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, remains one of the biggest global public health challenges our generation is facing. The number of people living with dementia worldwide is estimated as of now at 44 million, set to almost double by 2030 and more than triple by 2050. Cognitive impairment, however, is further deteriorated if individuals also suffer from additional diseases, such as Parkinson’s, which causes problems like loss of judgment, alterations in behavior, change in the way of one´s emotional responses and difficulties in planning and organizing. All these symptoms cause difficulties in the patients’ daily life as well as in their capacity to live alone. On the other side, senior citizens in Europe desire to live at their houses. Nevertheless, Dementia, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s patients have a lot of problems to manage alone and require for care. As the disease progresses, the families need to dedicate more time as well as mental and physical effort to the care of their relatives. This poses challenges to public authorities, policy makers and businesses, especially as it comes at a time of increasing pressure on public budgets, steady decline in the number of health personnel and growing demands from senior citizens for personalized care products and services. ICT4Life develops services for monitoring personal health status by means of home-based, rehabilitation and institutional transparent sensoring of a patient’s everyday activities. It will offer effective personalized training, using biosensors and other passive sensors, such as Kinect and HD cameras. The usage of sensors that is employed in ICT4Life can monitor the patient, track his condition and send a direct notification in case of emergency to relatives, carers or doctors. As a result, this will lead to the reduction of hospitalizations and consequently to the reduction of healthcare costs. It is important to improve the daily life of the patients without disturbing their daily activities at home, by monitoring their health condition (indoor). To that end, ICT4Life, uses various sensors such as Kinect V2, Zenith camera, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Binary sensor and wrist monitor bands. We choose the above sensors because they are non-intrusive and affordable and they can collect a vast amount of data for patient’s health condition. Kinect V2 sensor is a depth sensor, which is able to retrieve the location of the human body in detail up to 30 times per second. As a result, by analyzing these data with intelligent machine learning tools, we are able to detect human motion and identify the user’s actions. Also, we can identify alert events such as person fall, loss of balance, festination or freezing. Zenith camera is located on the room ceil and has a 360° all-round view able to capture the entire room of a patient. As a result, it can detect the patient’s movement and provide trajectories of his motion in the room for further analysis. Wrist bracelet is a wearable device that is continuously connected to the ICT4Life system and it can inform the system in real time about the patient heart beat rate, step counter, galvanic skin response etc. WSN consists of a set of sensor nodes deployed in a physical environment (indoor monitoring), which combined with the wrist bracelet can track the patient and identify his location, not only in a room, but in a larger area such as a house. Binary sensors are reed switch sensors, which will be deployed on main doors, cupboards and drawers to detect the open/closed status. Their main role consists in augmenting activity recognition, by capturing a user’s behavior along with the state change of the monitored environment. The sensors above will detect and monitor motion day and night in order to infer if a patient is disoriented, confused, spends too much time on bed or couch or tries to leave the house. Moreover, they will also look for if a patient has fallen down, been in a frozen state, lost his balance or festinated in order to alert caregivers and professional for an immediate care. Additionally, through these sensors there will be an evaluation of therapy related exercises for the patient. Finally, this technology can be a lifeline for the global economy, bleeding in an effort to treat chronic diseases of the elderly. It can reduce the number of hospital admissions and the number of days spent in care institutions as well as prolong the days of staying at their own houses. Moreover, the overall costs of treatment and social care will decrease since there will be less visits to hospitals. For example, pacemaker manufacturers already collect data from devices to prevent problems and to help people to avoid hospitalization. Reference [1] https://www.alz.co.uk/research/WorldAlzheimerReport2014.pdf Source: http://www.ict4life.eu/?p=1778