iCare Home Portal: An Extended Model of Quality Aging e-Services

Abstract

The quality of life of senior citizens is a critical issue around the world today. According to the World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/), there were 600 million people aged 60 or above in 2000; there will be 1.2 billion by 2025 and 2 billion by 2050. In addition to the thousands of unnecessary deaths that occur every year, missed health care opportunities cost U.S. businesses more than US$1 billion in avoidable hospital bills and nearly 41 million work days, resulting in the loss of US$11.5 billion per year, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (http://www.aoa.gov/). These figures mean that assisted living and home care has become a fast growing health care sector. Scrutiny of the extant technologies for aging services (see Sidebar 1) reveals that they are invariably aimed at or electronic care (eCare), but overlook social and behavioral aspects. eCare is an emerging health care field that utilizes Web technologies. Angood2 identified three eCare trends that utilize the Internet: medical informatics (focused on information), telemedicine (focused on communication), and cybermedicine (focused on global networking technologies). These eCare trends share the belief that maintaining an independent lifestyle is socially important to the quality of life of seniors and caregivers and that it helps to reduce the potential health care costs that are associated with hospitalization or placement in a full-time care facility. Unfortunately, the existing health care or eCare services for seniors are mostly oriented toward clinical gerontology or neuropsychology. They overlook certain dimensions of quality, such as community involvement, consumer participation, and continuous quality improvement. In this article, we describe an intelligent care (iCare) system that results in an eCare system that is ambient enough to address the social and behavioral aspects of aging services. This iCare system is characterized by iCare ontology that features ambient service accessibility, unbound information reachability, attentive personalized service provision, innovative lifestyle creation, precious digital memory, and seamless social connection. The objective of the system is to provide quality e-Services to the elderly anywhere and at any time via an iCare home portal.