Scopus scopus - exported 1/8/16

BACKGROUND: The current trend in patient care is towards a more humanized and higher-quality healthcare. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the results of implementing a programme of healthcare with a reference nurse who welcomes the patient at hospital admission, visits regularly during hospital stay, and resolves doubts and problems.

The author discusses the experience with four Telecare technologies deployed by the Perth-Kinross Council to enable vulnerable clients, especially those with cognitive disabilities and functional disabilities, to remain safely in their homes with the support of formal and informal carers. This chapter presents the challenges of moving Telecare services from government funded demonstrations to locally supported permanent programs. Special attention is paid to potential barriers relating to sustainable funding and insufficient evidence of effectiveness.

Aim: Reports on social risk factors for falls are scarce. This study explored the associations of selected sociodemographic and health variables with falls among rural Nigerian community-dwelling older adults.

Methods: The present cross-sectional study involved 131 community-dwelling older adults (84 women and 47 men) recruited at an outreach center. Demographic (age, sex and marital status), social (frequency of visiting relations and friends, and number of consistent informal carers) and health (number of comorbid conditions) variables were recorded.

Informal carers lack adequate practical and emotional support. This PhD investigates how a software agent could be used to help maintain a carer's personal social network by mediating communication and facilitating the provision of emotional and practical support. The agent should use features of the carer and their social network to provide a personalized support interface.

Grounds: The aim of our work has been to value the social support realised in 64 year old patients as web as in their informal carers in a Hospital Service of Traumatology and, at the same time, to know the specific characteristics in our work. Methods: all the variables have been taken thyrough a triple questionnaire structured in a total of 127 patients, using the questionnaire Duke-UNC to measure the functional social support. Results: For ill people, the punctuation of perceived social support was 44,6 on average; the informal carers presented an average global perception of 43,9.

OBJECTIVE: The Austrian long-term care system covers all types of long-term chronic diseases and handicaps and is based on a payment for care scheme. The benefit is directed to care recipients, who are - in the outpatient sector - largely free in how to use it. Herewith, the payment for care scheme also has a significant impact on the provision of informal care. The paper studies this impact for the particular case of informal care provided for mentally ill people.

This paper presents the HealthMon framework towards accessible mobile health. Following the emergence of wearables with rich sensing capabilities in the market, HealthMon repurposes an affordable, retail wristband to clinical monitoring scenarios for conditions that impair independence e.g. dementia, Parkinson's or ageing. Multiple sensor modalities, such as physical activity levels, posture and heart rate, are unanimously stored and interpreted to produce real-time alerts, using Semantic Web technologies.

The study aimed to identify the shared issues and challenges being experienced by staff, their clients and informal carers, with the introduction of Consumer Directed Care (CDC). Secondary analysis was undertaken of data that had been initially collected, via semi-structured in-depth interviews, to inform the development of a discrete choice experiment. The raw staff and client/carer data were re-examined using an iterative inductive process. The analysis focused on locating the shared themes and differences between the participant groups based on their CDC experience.

Research demonstrates that the family is the principal source of care for elderly people in case of disability or other needs. While considerable attention has been given to different aspects of caregiving, few studies have incorporated the adequacy of care provided by families. The purpose of this presentation is to delimit family aspects that we have been neglecting or we have preferred not to see which are relevant for the quality of life of the elderly.