Sensors Monitor Elderly People

Increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room or nursing homes. An elderly person discovered the power of a system called eNeighbor when she fell to the floor of her Philadelphia apartment late one night without her emergency alert pendant and could not phone for help. A wireless sensor under the elderly person’s bed detected that she had gotten up. Motion detectors in her bedroom and bathroom registered that she had not left the area in her usual pattern and relayed that information to a central monitoring system, prompting a call to her telephone to ask if she was all right. When she did not answer, that incited more calls — to a neighbor, to the building manager and finally to 911, which dispatched fire-fighters to break through her door. She had been on the floor less than an hour when they arrived. Technologies like eNeighbor come with great promise of improved care at lower cost and the backing of large companies like Intel and General Electric.

But the devices, which can be expensive, remain largely unproven and are not usually covered by the government or private insurance plans. Doctors are not trained to treat patients using remote data and have no mechanism to be paid for doing so. And like all technologies, the devices — including motion sensors, pill compliance detectors and wireless devices that transmit data on blood pressure, weight, oxygen and glucose levels — may have unintended consequences, substituting electronic measurements for face-to-face contact with doctors, nurses and family members. Stories like this one show the potential of relatively simple devices to provide comfort and independence to an aging population that is quickly outgrowing the resources of doctors, nurses, hospitals and health care dollars available to it. The cost for the above basic system, supplied by a health care provider called New Courtland as part of a publicly financed program, is about $100 a month, far less than a nursing home, where the costs to taxpayers can exceed $200 a day. In the two years the elderly person that had the system, has fallen three times and been stuck once in the bathtub, each time unable to call for help without it.

More information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13senior.html?_r=1