Communications and Safety Monitoring System (CoSMoS) for home-based elderly care

描述（由申请人提供）：与大多数发达国家一样，美国的人口正在老龄化，而且老龄化的速度正在加快。人口结构的这种变化对国家的医疗保健服务系统和相关的公共成本产生了巨大影响。老年人的长期家庭护理是这一成本趋势的主要组成部分。有人提出，通过应用新的辅助生活技术，支持远程监测老年患者的活动、健康和安全，可以显著提高家庭护理的质量，显著减少家庭护理人员的成本和时间负担。这项技术有望在未来降低成本和提高居家养老质量方面发挥至关重要的作用。然而，现有的和最近提出的辅助生活技术都存在一个或多个问题或限制，包括昂贵和复杂的安装、使用和维护。该项目提出了一种称为通信和安全监控系统（CoSMoS）的替代方法。CoSMoS旨在提供相对优越的远程活动、健康和安全监测以及通信功能，并通过集成当今最好的网络和硬件解决方案，以更低的安装、使用和维护成本实现这些功能。CoSMoS平台将是一个集成的硬件/软件解决方案，用户友好，可扩展，并将促进安全，非侵入性通信，并通过网络界面对老年人进行远程监控。CoSMoS平台的开放性和灵活性将允许第三方（如临床研究人员和医疗设备制造商）开发新的应用程序，这些应用程序可以在相同的基础设施上轻松部署，从而促进未来重要的应用程序和临床研究。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The population of the United States, as in most developed nations, is aging and is doing so at an increasing rate. This change in demographics is having a dramatic affect on the nation's healthcare delivery system and the related public costs. Long-term home care for the elderly is a major component of this cost trend. It has been proposed that the quality of home care can be significantly improved and the cost, as well as the time burden to family caregivers, significantly reduce through the application of new assisted living technologies that supports the remote monitoring of the elderly patient's activities, health and safety. This technology is expected to play a vital role in decreasing the cost and increasing the quality of elderly home-based care in the future. However, both the existing and more recently proposed assisted living technologies present one or more problems or limitations including being expensive and complex to install, use and maintain. This project presents a alternative approach called the Communications and Safety Monitoring System (CoSMoS). CoSMoS is intended to deliver comparably superior remote activity, health and safety monitoring, as well as communication functions, and do so at a much lower cost of installation, use and maintenance by integrating the best of breed network and hardware solutions available today. The CoSMoS platform will be an integrated hardware/software solution that is user-friendly, scalable and that will facilitate secure, non-intrusive communication and remote monitoring of elderly users by their caregivers, families and peers through a Web interface. The open and flexible nature of the CoSMoS platform will permit third parties, such a clinical researchers and medical device manufacturers, to develop new applications which can be easily and readily deployed over the same infrastructure thereby facilitating important applications and clinical research in the future. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project proposes to develop a new, low cost, ubiquitous and easy to use application, called CoSMoS, to support the independent living of the elderly. It will accomplish this by facilitating communication and interaction between them and their peers, caregivers, friends and family members while also providing information to caregivers with which to evaluate their health, safety or the need for intervention.