Head-mounted Activity Monitoring(HAM)System Fast Track

描述（由申请人提供）：美国的人口，在大多数发达国家，正在老龄化，并正在以越来越快的速度这样做。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。国会预算办公室预测，老年人的长期护理费用将在2020年达到2070亿美元，2040年达到3460亿美元。到2030年，社会保障、医疗保险和医疗补助的支出将占联邦预算的近60%。大多数老年人及其家人的强烈偏好是更喜欢在家中提供长期护理， 而不是在制度化的环境中。这导致老年人护理费用大规模转移到无报酬的家庭护理人员身上，而这一费用没有反映在上述预算数字中。然而，由于出生率下降和越来越多的成年人活到老年而没有活着的子女，继续将老年人护理费用转移到家庭成员身上是不可持续的。因此，将越来越迫切地需要公开 我们必须为长者家居照顾提供资助，同时亦迫切需要控制这项照顾的高昂费用。为老年人提供更有效的家庭护理服务可以对控制甚至降低长期老年人护理的成本产生重大影响。 然而，为了以具有成本效益的方式提供这种护理，将需要为此目的优化的基于技术的基础设施。实现这一目标的一种手段是开发创新的移动的技术解决方案，这些解决方案可以监测和保持家中老年人的活动、健康和安全，从而保持老年人的独立性。我们在这个提案中的工作假设是，一个设计合理的头戴式可穿戴计算解决方案可以带来独特而强大的功能，以满足更有效和更低成本的老年人家庭监控的需求。我们建议开发一种高度紧凑，重量轻，创新的技术，称为头戴式活动监测（HAM）系统。

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 effect on the nation's healthcare delivery system and the related public costs. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the cost of long-term care for the elderly will reach $207 billion in 2020 and $346 billion in 2040. By 2030, spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will amount to almost 60% of the federal budget. The strong predilection of most of the elderly, and their families, is to prefer long-term care delivery in the home rather than in the institutionalized setting. This has resulted in a massive shift of elderly care costs t unpaid family caregivers, and this cost is not reflected in the budget numbers provided above. However, the continuation of this shifting of elderly care costs to family members is not sustainable due to the decrease in birth rate and the increasing number of adults surviving to old age without living children. As a result there will be an increasingly urgent need for publicly funded support of elderly home-based care while, at the same time, an equally urgent need to control the spirally cost of this care. More efficient delivery of home-care services for the eldery can have a significant impact on controlling, or even reducing, the cost of long-term elderly care. However, in order to deliver this care cost-effectively, a technology-based infrastructure optimized for this purpose will be required. One means of achieving this goal is by developing innovative mobile technology solutions which can monitor and maintain the activity, health and safety, and thereby the independence, of the elderly within the home. Our working hypothesis in this proposal is that a properly designed, head-mounted, wearable-computing solution can bring unique and powerful capabilities to address the need for more effective and lower-cost elderly home monitoring. We propose to develop a highly compact, light-weight, innovative technology called the Head-mounted Activity Monitoring (HAM) System.