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

描述(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，而且正在以更快的速度老龄化。人口结构的这种变化对国家的医疗保健提供系统和相关的公共成本产生了巨大的影响。对老年人的长期居家护理是这一成本趋势的主要组成部分。有人建议，通过应用支持远程监测老年患者活动、健康和安全的新的辅助生活技术，可以显著提高家庭护理的质量，显著降低成本以及家庭照顾者的时间负担。这项技术有望在未来降低老年人居家护理的成本和提高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，包括安装、使用和维护昂贵和复杂。该项目提出了一种称为通信和安全监测系统(COSMOS)的替代方法。COSMOS旨在提供相当优越的远程活动、健康和安全监测以及通信功能，并通过集成当今可用的同类最佳网络和硬件解决方案，以低得多的安装、使用和维护成本做到这一点。COSMOS平台将是一个用户友好、可扩展的综合硬件/软件解决方案，它将促进老年用户的照顾者、家人和同龄人通过网络界面进行安全、非侵入性的通信和远程监测。COSMOS平台的开放和灵活特性将允许第三方，如临床研究人员和医疗器械制造商，开发新的应用程序，这些应用程序可以轻松地部署在相同的基础设施上，从而促进未来的重要应用程序和临床研究。 公共卫生相关性：该项目建议开发一种新的、低成本、无处不在且易于使用的应用程序，称为COSMOS，以支持老年人的独立生活。它将通过促进他们与其同龄人、照顾者、朋友和家人之间的沟通和互动来实现这一点，同时还向照顾者提供信息，以评估他们的健康、安全或是否需要干预。

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.