Abstract
While the oldest old (85+) are the fastest expanding demographic group, the number of health-care professionals trained to support their care is predicted to shrink from even today’s inadequate levels. Institutions are under pressure from changes in health-care policy as the percentage of older adults continue to increase, while the number of working age adults decreases. With personnel and financial resources constrained, efficiency and better approaches to care are required. Empowering older adults to better self-manage and automate monitoring of their own care means that the one increasing resource, the older adult, is playing the key role in maintaining health. Telemedicine, specifically mobile health or M-health, can be integrated to bridge this need.
In the near future, it is likely that we will finally have affordable, commercially available services for the home that provide comprehensive and flexible monitoring, safety, self-management support, and comprehensive communication with health-care professionals overseeing recovery and ongoing care. It is our purpose here to review the state of the art in app development within the context of smart home-care technologies and how to best create apps to serve in this bridging role. We describe here an organizing model to better understand the ability of these technologies to deliver care in the home and importantly provide a bridge to care and for the use in self-management of chronic conditions. Our proposed organizing model focuses on the degree of support and the degree of integration with the health-care professional to assess the technology ability to ensure successful outcomes for the patients, the organizations, and health-care professionals that care for them.
We discuss the use of user stories to best leverage building apps and discuss key design elements for smart home apps and share several examples of two difficult home health challenges, medication reminding and wander control.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Sterns, A.A. (2016). Apps and M-Health Within the Context of Smart Homes for Healthcare. In: van Hoof, J., Demiris, G., Wouters, E. (eds) Handbook of Smart Homes, Health Care and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01904-8_27-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01904-8_27-1
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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