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Integrated e-Healthcare System for Elderly Support

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Abstract

The fast rise of the population aging verified in the last decades brings new challenges to the modern societies. Most elderly persons have the usual problems related to the old age, like health chronic problems and sensory and cognitive impairments. Therefore, it becomes essential to ensure the quality of life, safety and well-being to all elderly persons. The evolution of the sensors technology, low-power microelectronics and wireless communication standards allows that the gerontechnology be increasingly available and present in our society. This paper presents an integrated e-healthcare system for elderly support, which allows monitoring the biomedical parameters of a person in real time, anywhere and in any situation without interfering with its daily routines. The developed system comprises a personal biomedical data acquisition subsystem and an information storage center. The developed sensorial devices are responsible for acquiring and transmit wirelessly the biomedical signals to a smartphone or tablet. The collected information can also be saved in a storage center, where it can be managed and maintained. The medical data are accessible to the responsible entities for creating the medical history of the elderly persons to ensure a well-founded diagnosis. The high processing capacity of the developed electronic system enables the implementation of advanced algorithms for detection of health problems in order to ensure the safety and well-being of the elderly throughout the day. The medical assistance platform also provides to the elderlies telemedicine consultations in the comfort of their home if the videoconferencing service of the platform is used.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by: (1) Integrated e-Healthcare System for Elderly Support project of the Electrical Engineering Department of School of Technology of Management of Polytechnic Institute of Leiria and (2) Medicine4ALL Anytime Anywhere project, project funded by INOV INESC INOVAÇÃO—Institute for New Technologies. The authors also want to acknowledge the support given by Texas Instruments, Linear Technology, Analog Devices, TE Connectivity, Maxim Integrated, OKW Enclosures, STMicroelectronics, Coilcraft and Microchip. All these companies provided several samples of the required components for the medical hub device and for the biomedical sensorial devices without any cost.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, 2411-901, Leiria, Portugal

    Pedro Pires, Luís Mendes & Rúben Rodrigues

  2. Institute of Telecommunications, Lisbon, Portugal

    Luís Mendes

  3. School of Technology and Management, Computer Science and Communications Research Centre, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, 2411-901, Leiria, Portugal

    Jorge Mendes & António Pereira

  4. INOV INESC INOVAÇÃO Institute of New Technologies – Leiria Office, 2411-901, Leiria, Portugal

    António Pereira

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  1. Pedro Pires
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Correspondence to António Pereira.

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Conflict of Interest

Pedro Pires, Luís Mendes, Jorge Mendes, Rúben Rodrigues, António Pereira declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008 (5). Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study. All participants of the presented research project were informed and consented to participate in the project.

Human and Animal Rights

All the participants in the platform tests gave their consent and full agreed to be part of the experimental tests. This work has not used animals in any experiments. Although if animals were used, all institutional and national guides for the care and use of laboratory animals would be followed.

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Pires, P., Mendes, L., Mendes, J. et al. Integrated e-Healthcare System for Elderly Support. Cogn Comput 8, 368–384 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-015-9367-3

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