Guardian Professional
“The Department of Health has said that over the next five years it will work with industry, the NHS, social care and professional organisations so that people with long term illness can benefit from assistive technologies such as telehealth and telecare.
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Todd Neale, MedPage Today
“For patients who are unable to walk following a stroke, robot-assisted gait training results in greater long-term gains in mobility than conventional therapy for those with the most severe deficits, researchers found.
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Matthew Rutter and Joe Stringer, Public Finance
“We welcome the Department of Health’s promise to ‘rapidly accelerate the use of assistive technologies in the NHS, aiming to improve at least three million lives over the next five years.’ This was made in its report Innovation Health and Wealth, Accelerating Adoption and Diffusion in the NHS.
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Eric Wicklund, Healthcare IT News
“Developers of a subscription-based telehealth service launched today in New York say it will give the nation’s ever-growing ranks of seniors the ability to “age gracefully at home.”
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Brunsman-Johnson C et al, Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology, 2011
Purpose.
This article describes website information seeking strategies used by users who are blind and compares those with sighted users. It outlines how assistive technologies and website design can aid users who are blind while information seeking.
Method.
People who are blind and sighted are tested using an assessment tool and performing several tasks on websites. The times and keystrokes are recorded for all tasks as well as commands used and spatial questioning.
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Laurie Orlov, Aging In Place Technology Watch
“Back from the Alzheimer’s Association of the Northwest. Walking the aisles of the exhibit floor, one could get the impression that the key for family members and professionals is finding a good home care agency or assisted living placement. Which reminds me, that despite the best of intentions in the aging services worlds, I rarely see evidence that it is at the top of the priority lists of these organizations to ensure that those they serve know what technologies might be of some benefit to them.
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ash, biomedme.com
“Thick gravel, mud, snow, steep ramps or hills . . . They might get a pedestrian a little dirty or out of breath, but to someone in an electric wheelchair, they could mean terrain that’s simply too difficult to cross alone.
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Harper S, Yesilada Y. Disability and Rehabilitation. Assistive Technology, 2010
This is a technological review paper focussed on identifying both the research challenges and opportunities for further investigation arising from emerging technologies, and it does not aim to propose any recommendation or standard. It is focussed on blind and partially sighted World Wide Web (Web) users along with others who use assistive technologies. The Web is a fast moving interdisciplinary domain in which new technologies, techniques and research is in perpetual development. It is often difficult to maintain a holistic view of new developments within the multiple domains which together make up the Web.
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Ishan Goradiya, EzineMark
“Elderly are people who have become too old and have many difficulties in leading their day to day lives. Most of the elderly today suffer from hearing loss, loss of vision, loss of memory, physical disability and several more problems. Also, they are very weak and even if they recover from any disability, they still are going to be weak.
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Langensiepen C et al, Journal of Assistive Technologies, 4(4)
The world has an ageing population who want to stay at home, many of whom are unable to care for themselves without help. As the number of available carers is becoming saturated by demand, research is being carried out into how technology could assist elderly people in the home. A barrier preventing wide adoption is that this audience can find controlling assistive technology difficult, as they may be less dexterous and computer literate. This paper explores the use of gestures to control home automation, hoping to provide a more natural and intuitive interface to help bridge the gap between technology and older users.
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Linskell J, Hill J. Journal of Assistive Technologies, 4(4)
This paper describes the role that smart home technology can play in enhancing the provision of supported living for people with complex needs and challenging behaviour. Intelligent building systems, or smart house technologies, offer a flexible environment that can be readily adapted and mapped onto the needs of service users and their carers. The effective management and presentation of information on the activity of service users can assist in planning care and facilitating responses to their needs in ways that promote individual dignity and independence.
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Fiona Barr, e-Health Insider Primary Care
“A pioneering telehealth project has shown that Kent could save £7.5m a year by using assistive technology.
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Skynews.com.au
“Scientists in Japan have developed a robot that can aid people with mild dementia by giving verbal reminders about things such as appointments and taking medicine.
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In the digital city of the future there is the vision of seamless virtual and physical access for every home and between each home and the workplace, as well as critical city infrastructure such as the post office, the bank, hospitals, transportation systems, and other entities. This paper provides an overview of technical and other issues in extending at home (@home) assistive technologies for the elderly and the disabled. The paper starts by giving a vision of what this city is supposed to look like and how a human is to act, navigate and function in it. A framework for extending assistive technologies is proposed that considers individuals belonging to special groups of interest and locations other than their home. Technology has already reached the state of ubiquitous and pervasive sensor devices measuring everything, from temperature to human behavior.
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Victoria Lambert, Telegraph.co.uk
“Every morning, 62-year-old Eddie Beardsmore is greeted by beeps coming from a small black box on his hall table, followed by the message: “Time to take your readings!” Eddie, a former sales manager from Looe, Cornwall, suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) which means his lung function is severely impaired.
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Fiona Barr, e-Health Insider Primary Care
“Government procurement agency Buying Solutions has announced that it has awarded a new framework agreement for assistive technologies.
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Fiona Barr, e-Health Insider Primary Care
“More evidence on the cost-effectiveness of telehealth and telecare innovations is needed to encourage their wider adoption, according to a review of use of assistive technologies in health and social care.
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Holthe T, Walderhaug S. Journal of Assistive Technologies, 4(2)
The EU-funded project ‘Middleware Platform for eMPOWERing older people and people with cognitive impairments – MPOWER’ is aimed at developing a technical middleware platform that enables rapid development of flexible, domain-specific applications that can be personalised for individual use. We focused on creating a set of reusable components that can easily be combined in order to provide the most relevant services in the user’s home, eg. calendar services, messaging services and different sensor technologies. In order to evaluate the feasibility of the platform, two full-scale proof of concept applications (POCAs) were developed and deployed to real-life environments; one ‘smart home’ solution in Poland and one individual internet-based digital plan in Norway. This paper presents the findings from the POCA development and trial in Norway.
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eHealthNews.eu
“A consultation inviting citizens, businesses and researchers to share ideas on how best to use information and communications technologies (ICTs) to help older Europeans live more independently, and more generally to establish new ways to put ICTs at the service of the most vulnerable members of society, has been launched by a high-level panel established to advise the European Commission on the functioning of the Ambient Assisted Living joint programme (AAL JP).
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Zheng H et al, J Telemed Telecare, 16(4)
We have developed a personalised self management system to support self management of chronic conditions with support from health-care professionals. Accelerometers are used to measure gross levels of activity, for example walking around the house, and used to infer higher level activity states, such as standing, sitting and lying. A smart phone containing an accelerometer and a global positioning system (GPS) module can be used to monitor outdoor activity, providing both activity and location based information.
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