NOCTURNAL - Night Optimised Care Technology for UseRs Needing Assisted Lifestyles

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NOCTURNAL (Night Optimised Care Technology for UseRs Needing Assisted Lifestyles) aims to address the needs of people at the early stages of dementia providing therapeutic support and guidance during the hours of darkness.There is a significant amount of scientific and clinical research that addresses the needs of People with Dementia (PwD) during daytime; for example, inferring Activities of Daily Living (ADL) from behaviour recorded in technology enriched environments. There is no notable body of work for holistic support of PwD during the hours of darkness despite the vulnerability PwD have at that time. There are only a few scarce studies, focused on simplistic architectures, addressing anxiety or night time falls through the use of accelerometers or detection of potential problems by measuring how long it takes for a person to go back to bed. Noticeably there is no specific provision of service that supports PwD during night time or addresses their needs in a more holistic way. NOCTURNAL addresses this gap and provides an assisted living information platform to promote safety and well-being using the current state of the art technology in support of PwD during the night. The primary objective of the work is to provide new technological capabilities that support more sophisticated service offerings to be marketed by Fold Housing Association Ltd (the company) and hence increase competitiveness of the UK in this market. As well as this primary objective of service evolution underpinned by technological advancement, there will be related research objectives to support that service evolution. The fundamental research questions NOCTURNAL will focus on are : How can technology assist people with dementia and their carers during night time? , Which of the technologies and caring protocols designed to be used for assistance during daylight time can be used during night time? , What technology and caring protocols should be developed specifically for its applications during the night period? , How care services and the related user-carers should be reconsidered in this situation? and Can we develop new evaluation frameworks that are inclusive of carers as well as PwD? . NOCTURNAL will research new modalities (for example lighting and music) of assisting the PwD supported by the proposed system. It will also be innovative on redesigning current methodologies that are used to recognize patterns of behaviour to offer more sophisticated interventions that can incorporate the specific technology being introduced. The technology will be configurable in order to meet the needs of people with combinations of disabilities (e.g., audio options for blind PwD) or personal preferences. The scenarios that we envisage include managing a PwD as they awake, support a person returning to sleep, reinforcement of prospective memory in evening and morning time, guidance when PwD going to the bathroom (or other rooms) and returning to bed. For these scenarios, NOCTURNAL will seek to maximise feelings of safety, prevent falls and encourage wellbeing. NOCTURNAL brings together a well established service provider, Fold Housing Association's Telecare organisation, and academic researchers, the University of Ulster, to enhance and promote current services to PwD. NOCTURNAL is beneficial to the UK because it provides a proof of the concept of nighttime therapeutic support and guidance for PwD, that is then validated within an existing service framework by the company. This will provide a base of evidence across the various disciplines and areas, informing the market of the changes and opportunities required in health and well being models, economics, usability, service provision, data management, technology framework, trust issues as well as privacy.