International Study on Life Support Devices for the Elderly

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Today the aging of our society is one of the most important topics in the world. In this study, international survey on technologies to support the life and living of elderly people had been done, to clarify appropriate ways of international cooperation.The survey had been done in the North America, Europe and China. In medical engineering field, less/minimum invasive surgery was the most hot topic. Great number of studies had been done in many countries on application of medical images, optical scopes, surgical planning and surgical robots. We found that it was needed to establish the guidelines to avoid accidents in clinical evaluation of such surgical robots.In the field of rehabilitation engineering, rehabilitation robotics was one of the most expected areas. In addition, researchers had studied on application of multimedia communication to support elderly and disabled people living in their own home. Though virtual reality was newly available technology, several studies had done to motivate disabled children to perform their rehabilitation program. What we found was the great significance of needs analysis to develop products which were truly effective. To deliver appropriate products, we need to evaluate the quality of life of the user. Since there were no established methods to evaluate, researches on this topic had been doing specially in Nordic countries. We must study our own method to evaluate the quality of life in the Japanese life style which is apparently different from European ones.We concluded as follows ; the most important key technology is robotics. In this field, Japan can contribute greatly to international cooperation in the future. In development of products, safety should be considered sufficiently. To achieve safety, standardization work would be needed and Japan must be the most active country in the work.