Long-term care: how to improve the quality of life with mobile and e-health services

In the last decade, ageing has become a worldwideincreasing phenomenon leading to an increased need forspecialised help. Continuous monitoring, training and rehabilitationimprove the quality of life of older adults and discardthe risk of depression and social isolation. To this end, the useof mobile and e-health personalised services at home and inresidential long-term care facilities can help to stabilise the healthconditions of the subjects, in terms of physical, mental, and socialcapabilities. In this context, we propose a set of personalisedmonitoring and rehabilitation services based on mobile, wearable,free contact, and touch screen technologies designed to providean integrated care and monitoring programme for elderly frailsubjects. We evaluated the proposed solutions by deploying theservices in a nursing home in Italy and defined customisedprotocols to involve both guests (primary users) and nursing carepersonnel (secondary users). In this paper, we present technicaldetails of the proposed solutions and the results obtained by therecently conducted surveys on the Quality of Experience anduser acceptance of both user categories after 4 months from thedeployment.