Margriet Pol

Longitudinal ambient sensor monitoring for functional health assessments: a case study

Ambient monitoring systems offer great possibilities for health trend analysis in addition to anomaly detection. Health trend analysis helps care professionals to evaluate someones functional health and direct or evaluate the choice of interventions. This paper presents one case study of a person that was followed with an ambient monitoring system for almost three years and another of a person that was followed for over a year. A simple algorithm is applied to make a location based data representation. This data is visualized for care professionals, and used for inspecting the regularity of the pattern with means of principal component analysis (PCA). This paper provides a set of tools for analyzing longitudinal behavioral data for health assessments. We advocate a standardized data collection procedure, particularly the health metrics that could be used to validate health focused sensor data analyses.

Patient and proxy rating agreements on activities of daily living and the instrumental activities of daily living of acutely hospitalized older adults.

DISCUSSION This study has shown that care-related goals of communitydwelling frail older adults differ between individuals and cover domains that concern well-being just as much as they concern health and functioning. This agrees with previous research, in which participants stated that, except for maintaining health and functioning, maintaining independence and well-being were the most important goals. Participants’ goals were classified according to an existing taxonomy for goals. However, some additions to its domains were required, especially on the subject of well-being. Therefore, the domains living accommodation, activities, and health and welfare services were added, because many participants mentioned goals relating explicitly to these subjects. This study had some limitations. Because studying goals of frail older adults was not the primary aim of the studies used, nurses were not trained in goal-setting, which resulted in less attention being given to eliciting participants’ goals and case records sometimes lacking data concerning goals. In conclusion, this study has demonstrated that care-related goals of frail community-dwelling older adults are diverse and highly individual. This stresses the importance of discussing goals with patients in everyday clinical practice.