Home sweet home

Your home is your castle, as Darryl Kerrigan famously argued in the Australian movie, The Castle. And as we age, it often becomes important that we stay in our own home for as long as possible before moving into residential care.

Research currently underway at Monash University is looking to produce advances in sensor models that will allow the elderly to remain living independently longer in their homes.

Professor Ingrid Zukerman from Monash University’s Clayton School of Information Technology said the research aims to assess the needs of elderly people and the impact of sensor technology on their lives.

“It is important that people are safe in their homes and know that help is close at hand if the need arises,” Professor Zukerman said.

“In the first phase of the research we canvassed the views of our three stakeholder groups: older adults with vision impairment, informal caregivers and health-care professionals.

“We found that there were several important attributes which affect the acceptance of a monitoring computer system: affordability, ability to personalise the system, impact on quality of life, simplicity of installation and operation, capacity to monitor safe movement, and ability to issue appropriate user and caregiver alerts.

“These attributes will be used to guide the design of the monitoring system in the next stage of the project,” Professor Zukerman said.

Sensory devices, such as motion sensors, electricity and heat monitors, and cushion and mattress sensors, and intervention and communication devices will be deployed in the homes of participants to explore the levels of care/monitoring required. This will allow the researchers to find out how effective the various devices are in relaying the appropriate information about a person's status.

“By assessing the needs of elderly people, and the possible impact of technology on their lives, we hope to develop technologies that are unobtrusive and acceptable to elderly people,” Professor Zukerman said.

A potential outcome of the research is the development of a set of interventions and decision procedures that will improve the safety and independence of elderly people in their homes.

“We are hopeful that with a cost/outcome analysis of the planned technologies, some level of care will be affordable for most Australians so they can remain in their own homes longer,” Professor Zukerman said.

The project is a collaboration between researchers from Monash University’s Faculties of Information Technology and Engineering, the Centre for Eye Research Australia at the University of Melbourne, Vic Health, the Austrian Institute of Technology, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Meticube, Portugal.

It is being funded through an ARC Linkage grant, a Helen McPherson Smith grant and endowments from Vic Health and Meticube.