Use case 1: Long Term Care (LTC) scenario

The user of this UC is a very old person whose physical as well as cognitive conditions have required his/her recovery in a hospice. The user is affected by non-critical pathologies (e.g. minor hearth problems).

Additional users are family members who may not necessarily live close to the health care facility therefore regular visit at the premises may not be possible. This requires family member to rely upon medical staff for getting information about his/her health conditions.

The hospice rely upon private cloud-based services__*, which allows relatives (subject to explicit approval of the patient) and medical staff to access his/her clinical folder online and to be constantly updated on everything related to actions of the user. The hospice staff regularly use specific __online evaluation tests* (e.g., the Long Term Care Facility scale by InterRAI ™) in order to periodically evaluate the user’s cognitive conditions. If the parameters registered indicate a worsening of the patient’s situation, an alert is generated. The medical staff can then identify a new care project, for example changing medical treatment.

Within the facilities, a warning is generated whenever it is time for the user to take medicines. This is done, for instance, through dispatching of a message to the users’ mobile phone or tablet (via a dedicated app*) or to the TV set-up box* inside the room where the user is located. Once medication is taken the user is asked to provide explicit confirmation for staff to be able to check if the action has been completed.

This requires indoor localisation system e.g. based on tags to be worn by the users (e.g. belt or similar) in order to monitor his position inside the structure and in the surrounding garden. This allows re-enforcing of positive habits, for instance user being left free to walk (often very desiderable in case of relatively good heath conditions) by their own in the garden. At the same time monitoring allows ensuring maximum safety of the user, ensuring he/she is inside a secure area and he/she is not encountering any problems. In fact, the interface communicating with the sensor would produce an alarm if the user moved outside the hospice safe area.

*) “set-up box”, “system”, “app” and “service” all refer to the various components being developed by the EC funded project UNCAP ( www.uncap.eu )

-- GiuseppeConti - 28 May 2015