A Technology Platform for a Novel Home Care Delivery Service to Patients with Dementia

Chronic illnesses impose a great burden on the lives of citizens worldwide. In modern health-care, decentralisa-tion, dehospitalisation and self management of diseases at home are crucial factors for improving the every-day life of the patients and the people close to them. People in general tend to dislike obtrusive monitoring on their daily activities, so the challenge for home care solutions is to implement systems that provide clinicians with adequate and concise information on their patients' health status while at the same time be unobtrusive and easy to use. Moreover, such systems must ensure that they produce high impact warnings on the patient's status only when it is needed, in order to relieve clinicians from unnecessary workload and become a real tool for decision making and efficient patient follow-up. ALADDIN's objective is to develop a trustworthy and reliable system supporting patients with dementia and their informal carers in the management of the disease from home. Based on a set of monitoring parameters and measuring scales feeding a reconfigurable Event Detection mechanism used for Risk Assessment and Analysis, the system aims to early detect symptoms that predict decline, avoid emergencies and secondary effects and, ultimately, prolong the period that patients can remain safely cared at home. Informal carers are also closely monitored by the system whereas additional features supporting networking, education and cognitive stimulation are also integrated along with decision sup-port and patient management tools for the treating clinicians. The platform has been built based on credible methodologies for efficient patient follow-up, risk detection and adaptive care. It is an open, secure, interoper-able, integrated IT-solution designed according to Service Oriented Architecture principles. The benefits of this platform are expected to lie in the prevention of emergencies, in reduction of carer burden and in maintenance of the patient's and carer's quality of life.