This article describes how innovations are exploited in Campania (Italy) to improve health outcomes, quality of life, and sustainability of social and healthcare services. Campania's strategy for ...digitalization of health and care and for healthy aging is based on a person-centered, life-course, “One Health” approach, where demographic change is considered capable of stimulating a growth dynamic linked to the opportunities of combining the “Silver Economy” with local assets and the specific health needs of the population. The end-users (citizens, patients, and professionals) contribute to the co-creation of products and services, being involved in the identification of unmet needs and test-bed activity. The Campania Reference Site of the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Aging is a flexible regional ecosystem to address the challenge of an aging population with a life-course approach. The good practices, developed in the context of research and innovation projects and innovative procurements by local stakeholders and collaborations with international networks, have been allowing the transfer of innovative solutions, knowledge, and skills to the stakeholders of such a multi-sectoral ecosystem for health.
Challenges posed by demographic changes and population aging are key priorities for the Horizon 2020 Program of the European Commission. Aligned with the vision of the European Innovation Partnership ...on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA), the development, exchange, and large-scale adoption of innovative good practices is a key element of the responses required to ensure all European citizens remain as active and healthy as possible as they age. Urged by the need of developing scalable disruptive innovation across Europe, the European Commission and the EIP on AHA created the Reference Sites; local coalition of partners that develop good practices to support AHA. Ageing@Coimbra is an example of how this can be achieved at a regional level. The consortium comprises over 70 institutions that develop innovative practices to support AHA in Portugal. Ageing@Coimbra partners support a regional network of stakeholders that build a holistic ecosystem in health and social care, taking into consideration the specificities of the territories, living environments and cultural resources (2,243,934 inhabitants, 530,423 aged 65 or plus live in the Centre Region of Portugal). Good practices in reducing the burden of brain diseases that affect cognition and memory impairment in older people and tackling social isolation in urban and rural areas are among the top priorities of Ageing@Coimbra. Profiting from the collaborative work of academia, business companies, civil society, and authorities, the quadruple helix of Ageing@Coimbra supports: early diagnosis of frailty and disease; care and cure; and active, assisted, and independent living. This paper describes, as a Community Case Study, the creation of a Reference Site of the EIP on AHA, Ageing@Coimbra, and its impact in Portugal. This Reference Site can motivate other regions to develop innovative formulas to federate stakeholders and networks, building consortia at regional level. This growing movement, across Europe, is inspired by the quadruple helix concept and by the replication of innovative good practices; creating new Reference Sites for the benefit of Citizens.
Internet of things for an age-friendly healthcare Konstantinidis, Evdokimos I; Bamparopoulos, Giorgos; Billis, Antonis ...
Studies in health technology and informatics,
2015, Letnik:
210
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In healthcare applications a large cohort of recent implementations utilises IoT-oriented infrastructures (XMPP) as well as smart mobile devices as communication gateways. IoT characteristi ...Communication/Connectivity, Pervasive Computing and Ambient Intelligence, are all highly related to Active and Healthy Aging environments. This paper presents a new idea, that of IoT enabled devices which are directly connected to the IoT (a glucose meter is used as an example herein), complying with the XMPP messaging protocol and the incorporation of a recently released Controller Application Communication (CAC) framework for distributed, cross-platform communication. A web based exergaming platform and a disease management tool, provide the vehicles for the demonstration of the feasibility and the successful implementation and integration of the aforementioned infrastructure.
Objectives
To investigate clinical and laboratory variables associated with good subjective and objective health (“active and healthy aging”, AHA) in a cohort of octogenarian men.
Design
...Cross-sectional analyses of a longitudinal study.
Setting
The Helsinki Businessmen Study in Finland.
Participants
A socioeconomically homogenous cohort of men (baseline
n
= 3293), born in 1919–1934, has been followed up from the 1960s. From 2000, the men have been regularly sent mailed questionnaires and mortality has been retrieved from national registers.
Measurements
In 2010 survey, AHA was defined as independently responding to the mailed survey, feeling happy without cognitive or functional impairments and without major diseases. In 2010/11, a random subgroup men was clinically investigated and survivors with healthy and nonhealthy aging were compared.
Results
By 2010, 1788 men of the baseline cohort had died, and 894 men responded to the mailed survey. 154 (17.2 %) of those fulfilled the present AHA criteria. Increasing number of criteria were negatively (
P
< 0.001) related to short-term mortality. In 2011, a random sample of 458 men were clinically investigated, 90 of them with AHA. Men with AHA had higher serum LDL cholesterol and diastolic blood pressure (partially explained by less frequent drug use) but no significant difference was observed in other risk factors. Men with AHA had significantly faster walking speed (
P
< 0.001), stronger handgrip (
P
= 0.017), better self-rated health and less phenotypic frailty (
P
= 0.02).
Conclusion
Less than 5 % enjoyed active and healthy aging over their life course, which was significantly related to markers of frailty but not to the traditional vascular risk factors.
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) represents one of the most promising Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to its influence on the quality of life and health of the elderly people. However, the ...interoperability is one of the major issues that needs to be addressed to promote the adoption of AAL solutions in real environments. In this paper, an IoT prototype system for AAL called AAL-IoTSys is proposed, which includes a Smart IoT Gateway as a key component to enable the interoperability from several heterogeneous devices over different communication protocols and technologies (e.g., WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15.4, 6LowPAN). This system aims to monitor environmental (temperature, humidity, C02), health (heart rate) and location (GPS) parameters in the elderly people's houses in order to facilitate events early detection and automatic sending notifications to elderly care stakeholders in active and healthy aging scenarios (included health professionals, caregivers, family members and emergency services).
IoT can dramatically improve the quality of life of aged population. In this regard, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Active and Healthy Aging (AHA) are fields with an enormous potential to benefit ...from the current growth of IoT within our society. We present SAFE-ECH, an innovative intelligent AAL open source system for monitoring nursing homes. SAFE-ECH creates an Ambient Intelligent environment in a residence by collecting and storing sensor monitoring data, performing intelligent data analysis and specific actions to enhance the safety, comfort and efficient care of aged people. Our system allows caregivers to access the system to retrieve monitoring information and perform control actions. Our system implements open standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium complying with Observations & Measurements Schema (O&M), SensorML and Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) specifications. A key element is a Sensor Observation Service (SOS) for sensor data collection and management from heterogeneous sensor networks. A Complex Event Processor represents the intelligence of the system. Our system adapts to the specific needs of each nursing home, integrating the required sensors, actuators, rules and services. It is scalable and allows the management of several residences simultaneously.
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