Karolina Bezerra

Mechatronic system for assistance on bath of bedridden elderly people

The demographic changes demonstrate that the population is aging rapidly. The average life expectancy leads to the development of various diseases related to aging. The dependence and partial or total inability of a person to perform daily activities, requires a care plan to minimize the impact of their addiction. The main objective of assistance is to protect and care of fragile elders. Provide accesses to a walk-in or wheel chair accessible shower is essential for people with bathing disability. Bath is a fundamental action, referring to bedridden elder hygiene daily activities provided by caregivers. According to the context of care there must be provided particular attention to the skin of the elder. The contact of external means with this organ is one of the major concerns while designing this kind of devices as it can cause the thinning, drying and occasionally lesions and ulcers on the organ. This interdisciplinary concept project, on the domain of Ambient Assisted Living, consists in the conceptual design of a mechatronic system especially devoted to the assistance during the bath.

Development of a Medical Care Terminal for Efficient Monitoring of Bedridden Subjects

This work is developed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and has as main objective the development of a mechatronic system that allows the care of bedridden patients with ongoing medical care handled by a single person. The developed Medical Care Terminal (MCT) improves autonomy in home care, safety, comfort, and hygiene of bedridden patients. The MCT has six biomedical sensors and four environmental sensors. Data acquisition and processing is performed using Arduino and LabVIEW platforms, respectively. The proposed solution has, as main feature, its adaptability to the patient needs. One of the MCT functionalities is the remote access to the patient data through the web. The caregiver may request help from a specialist who sends back information in real time to perform first aid assistance. This device has a flexible configuration allowing a fast and cheap reconfiguration according the specific needs of the patient. The proposed mechatronic system intends to meet the needs of bedridden patients improving their quality of life, health, safety, and comfort, while enabling the remote monitoring of the patients.

System for Assistance on Bath of Bedridden Elderly People

The demographic changes demonstrate that the population is aging rapidly. The average life expectancy leads to the development of various diseases related to aging. The dependence and partial or total inability of a person to perform daily activities, requires a care plan to minimize the impact of their addiction. The main objective of assistance is to protect and care of fragile elders. Provide accesses to a walk-in or wheel chair accessible shower is essential for people with bathing disability. Bath is a fundamental action, referring to bedridden elder hygiene daily activities provided by caregivers. According to the context of care there must be provided particular attention to the skin of the elder. The contact of external means with this organ is one of the major concerns while designing this kind of devices as it can cause the thinning, drying and occasionally lesions and ulcers on the organ. This interdisciplinary concept project, on the domain of Ambient Assisted Living, consists in the conceptual design of a mechatronic system especially devoted to the assistance during the bath.

Bath-Ambience—A Mechatronic System for Assisting the Caregivers of Bedridden People

The health of older people is receiving special attention and dedication nowadays, with the aim of increasing their general wellbeing and quality of life. Studies into different aspects of the care of the elderly have found that emphasis should be given to solving problems related to bathing in different situations and environments. In particular, it is important to develop new assistive technologies to streamline and ease the burden of a caregiver’s daily tasks. Generally-speaking, in the case of bedridden patients, bathing is typically carried out manually by a caregiver, using towels, sponges, and a water basin. Nevertheless, this apparently simple task needs some precautions in order to avoid the risk of microbial infections, falls and other injuries. With that in mind, this paper presents the design of a portable washing system, called Bath-Ambience, which enables bedridden patients to be bathed efficiently without having to be moved from their position. This portable system can be installed in different situations, both in a domestic setting, and in specialized institutions, and allows the caregiver to perform the bathing tasks without compromising health and safety, thereby making it possible to offer a comfortable and hygienic procedure to patients, improving their quality of life. This paper presents the design of the portable Bath-Ambience washing system, which provides efficient assistance for bathing bedridden patients without moving them to another place. This system is mainly dedicated for integration a smart home application in to allow bathing everywhere.

Conceptual Design of a Mechatronic System for Supporting Basic Quality of Life of Bedridden Elderly People

Ambient Assisted Living is an important subject to be explored and developed, especially in developed countries, due to the increasing number of aged people. In this context the development of mechatronic support systems for bedridden elderly people (BEP) living in their homes is essential in order to support independence, autonomy and improve their quality of life. Some basic tasks as eating, taking a bath and/or hygiene cares become difficult to execute, regarding that often the main caregiver is the other element of the aged couple (husband or wife). This paper presents the conceptual design of a mechanical system especially devoted to assist the caregiver in the handling and repositioning of the BEP. Issues as reducing the number of caregivers, to only one, and reducing the systems handling complexity (because most of the time it will be used by an aged person) are considered. The expertise obtained from the visits to rehabilitation centers and hospitals, and from working meetings, are considered in the development of the proposed mechatronic system.

A Formal Approach for Railroad Traffic Modelling Using Timed Automata

The present paper proposes a new modelling framework well-suited to describe in detail multiple modelling features and interactions among different components of railway transport systems. Timed automata and Uppaal software tool were chosen because allow not only the introduction of additional features but also the construction and the verification of timed models. Another important advantage of the presented formalism is given by the possibility to operate modifications on the simulated maps only by changing the initialization variables and without changing the UPPAAL model. Different templates were defined to represents the complexity of railroad train station, two types of structures being taken into consideration: infrastructure – road, switches, traffic lights, platforms, and moving vehicles – engines, cars. To model and analyze the two types of structures, a two layered model based on Timed Automata was considered; one represents the components of the infrastructure and the relations between them and the second one represents the mobile components of the railroad traffic. The interactions between layers were defined using a set of rules implemented in “C” programming language. A case study was considered for simulation purposes, some possible scenarios being presented. A list of queries was generated in order to verify various properties. The proposed framework proved to be capable to model railway complex structures and to verify their behavior.

SmartBath: A New Bathing Concept for Disabled People

Nowadays, the development of equipment for the elderly care is of great importance due to the increased number of elderlies. The requirements and failures of the existing elderly-care devices were studied in order to identify the most important needs of the bathing activity and then a new concept is proposed ‘SmartBath’. The SmartBath is a new assistive technology to improve autonomy, quality, safety, comfort and hygiene of bathing for elderly or bedridden. The bathing is a daily activity that requires physical effort, dedication and time to perform from the caregiver. This new concept integrates an automatic control of the bathing temperature, water flow-rate and light intensity. This concept can be operated directly or remotely into the system using mobile devices.

Requirements for the development of medical devices - Caregivers perspectives survey

The growth of the elderly population enhances the importance of the quality of the healthcare, which should be administered daily by professionals, whether on a temporary or permanent basis. A core issue to take into account, in this context, is the characterization of these services, especially their adaptation to the specific needs of the bedridden people. In doing so, the quality of life of caregivers, in what concerns facilitating their daily tasks, is also taken into account. A questionnaire was developed to gather information allowing the characterization of both needs and gaps in healthcare identifying the particularities and necessities of the provided services. The questionnaire focuses on three targets: the bedridden characterization, the permanent caregiver and the non-permanent caregiver. The study is descriptive and exploratory, contemplating a quantitative approach. The main objective of the study is to define the important areas worthy of attention, to protect the healthcare of caregivers in the utilization of devices and to be able to build products without structural problems, thus, creating better condition of life and offer solutions in some contexts and tasks, such as, comfort, hygiene and safety.Copyright

Ambient assisted living platform for remote monitoring of bedridden people

The aim of this paper is to present a platform for remote monitoring of bedridden people developed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). This platform, Medical Care Terminal (MCT), includes the measurement of biomedical data (body temperature, galvanic skin resistance, electrocardiogram and electromyogram, level of oxygen, body position and breathing) as well environmental data (level of alcohol in the air, carbon monoxide level in the air, brightness and temperature). It presents three main issues, namely: it has a user-friendly interface; it is simple to use by a single elderly person; it can be adapted to the needs of a specific patient (custom-made solution), as the system can be configured in function of the measurements required for that specific patient (modular configuration). Finally, it is a low cost solution, affordable for low budget markets.

Design of a conceptual bed mattress for reducing pressure on bony prominences

This work has been supported by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia in the scope of the project: PEst UID/CEC/00319/2013.