Elderly folks tend to prefer to live in their own homes as the years pass, but the potential for accidents to happen leads many to seek nursing homes or to live with family. Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet Healthcare is reporting on technology from WellAWARE Systems (Charlottesville, Virginia) that monitors people in their homes with sensors in beds, bath tubs, and generally throughout the living space.
Dana Blankenhorn reports:
At this writing, 60 facilities have the WellAWARE system, company officials told ZDNet.
WellAWARE is offering a system of sensors that track a patient’s movement throughout their residence, comparing their activities to a baseline of normality, and alert caregivers to changes.
Noce explained how this worked recently with an 81 year old client aging-in-place in Hastings, NE:
"There was an alert that the woman had not slept for 26 hours. The woman was evasive, but we were able to be proactive, and the nurse was able to visit, knowing she hadn’t slept.
The woman finally admitted she’d been hallucinating. The nurse asked about medication, the woman said she had some, and the nurse found that one of the side effects of one medicine was hallucination. She was able to fix the situation in a day.
The patient didn’t have to do anything. The care giver was then able to provide an interaction that got correction.
More at ZDNet Healthcare…
Link: WellAWARE Systems…