A Scalable Home Care System Infrastructure Supporting Domiciliary Care

Citation

Gray P, McBryan T, Hine N, Martin CJ, Gil N, Wolters M, Mayo N, Turner KJ, Docherty LS, Wang F & Kolberg M (2007) A Scalable Home Care System Infrastructure Supporting Domiciliary Care. Scottish Funding Council. Technical Report CSM, 173. Department of Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling.

Abstract
Technology-mediated home care is attractive for older people living at home and also for their carers. It provides the information necessary to give confidence and assurance to everyone interested in the wellbeing of the older person. From a care delivery perspective, however, widespread deployment of home care technologies presents system developers with a set of challenges. These challenges arise from the issues associated with scaling from individual installations to providing a community-wide service, particularly when each installation is to be fitted to the particular but changing needs of the residents, their in-home carers and the larger healthcare community. This paper presents a home care software architecture and services that seek to address these challenges. The approach aims to generate the information needed in a timely and appropriate form to inform older residents and their carers about changing life style that may indicate a loss of well-being. It unites sensor-based services, home care policy management, resource discovery, multimodal interaction and dynamic configuration services. In this way, the approach offers the integration of a variety of home care services with adaptation to the context of use.

Keywords
Home Care; Software Architecture; Policy-Based Management; Context-Sensitive System; Multimodal System; Dynamic Reconfiguration; Systems Integration; Telecommunication in medicine; Management information systems; Interactive multimedia.

People

Dr Mario Kolberg

Senior Lecturer, Computing Science

Professor KEN Turner

Emeritus Professor, Computing Science