We think it's important to share our findings

Authors

Carragher, L., Evoy, J., & Mark, R.

Men learning through life seeks to identify new, practical and creative ways of working and involving men in communities of practice as active participants in shaping their own learning. The book has had multiple launches around the world, including three in the UK in February, Australia, New Zealand, Greece and Portugal and London in collaboration with Chapter authors.

Authors

Walsh, L., Kealy, A., Loane, J., Doyle, J. and Bond, R.

As the population ages, smart home technology and applications are expected to support older adults to age in place and reduce the associated economic and societal burden. This paper describes a study where the relationship between ambient sensors, permanently deployed as part of smart aware apartments, and clinically validated health questionnaires is investigated. 27 sets of ambient data were taken from a 28 day block from 13 participants all of whom were over 60 years old. Features derived from ambient sensor data were found to be significantly correlated to measures of anxiety, sleep quality, depression, loneliness, cognition, quality of life and independent living skills (IADL). Subsequently, linear discriminant analysis was shown to predict participants suffering from increased anxiety and loneliness with a high accuracy (≥70%). While the number of participants is small this study reports that objective ambient features may be used to infer clinically validated health metrics. Such findings may be used to inform interventions for active and healthy ageing.

Authors

Doyle, J. & Walsh, L.

Countries globally have been experiencing an unprecedented increase in the number of older adults. As a result there has been an elevated interest in understanding the factors that may support the maintenance of independent living and quality of life of older adults. There is a large role for innovative technology to support monitoring, early detection and management of health and wellbeing in the home. Most diagnostic and treatment approaches to health are centred in clinical settings, and very few have focused on improving the self-management of wellbeing using novel in-home, ICT (information communication technology) based intervention systems. Utilizing combinations of ambient sensor data acquisition, telehealth and ICT it is possible to predict changes in wellbeing, and to deliver feedback and interventions to support personal wellness management.

Authors

O’Sullivan, D., Doyle, J., Michalowski, W., Wilk, S., Thomas, R. and Farion, K.

Despite many clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) being rated as highly usable, CDSSs have not been widely adopted in clinical practice. We posit that there are factors aside from usability that impact adoption of CDSSs; in particular we are interested in the role played by MDs intrinsic motivation to use computer-based support. Our research aim is to investigate the relationship between usability and intrinsic motivation in order to learn about adoption of CDSS in clinical practice.

Authors

Doyle, J., Walsh, L., Sassu, A. and McDonagh, T.

It is recognized that empowering individuals to manage their own health and wellbeing will result in more cost-effective healthcare systems, improved health outcomes and will encourage healthy individuals to remain that way. With the advent of the quantified-self movement in recent years, there has been an increase in technology applications supporting wellness self-management. Such applications allow people to self-track and self-report, with many providing feedback. However, little research in this area has examined how best to support older adults in health self-management. This paper reports findings from a 5-month home deployment of YourWellness – an application that supports older adults in self-reporting on their wellbeing and provides feedback to promote positive wellbeing management. Our findings contribute to a greater understanding of older adults’ attitudes and behaviours in relation to wellbeing self-management that can facilitate the creation of new, personalized health and wellbeing interventions for this population.

Authors

Bond, R., Ceinos, C., Mountzi, V.

The HAIVISIO project is aimed at enhancing the visibility and awareness of the results of existing e-Health, Active Ageing and Independent Living projects funded by the European Commission. HAIVISIO is centred on building a community of relevant projects and stakeholders, organised around adding value and enhancing the impact of their emerging good-practices and project assets. The goal is to improve the impact of well performing projects through sharing, synergy building and appropriate communications.

Authors

Doyle, J., Kealy, A., Loane, J., Walsh, L., O’Mullane, B., Flynn, C., MacFarlane, A., Bortz, B., Knapp, B and Bond, R.

With an ageing population and the constant need towards improving the quality of life for older people in our society, there comes an urgent challenge to support people where they live in an environment that adapts to their needs as they age. While much research on ubiquitous sensor systems and telehealth devices focuses on this need, many of these solutions operate at less than full capacity, and with little scope at present to assess everyday aspects of wellbeing. They focus on detecting sudden critical physiological and behavioural changes and offer few mechanisms to support preventative actions. The challenge of predicting changes and prompting positive preventa-tive intervention measures, aiding the avoidance of severe physical or mental harm, has not adequately been ad-dressed. This paper discusses our experiences of designing, deploying and testing an integrated home-based am-bient assisted living (AAL) system for older adults, consisting of ambient monitoring, behaviour recognition and feedback to support self-management of wellness, in addition to providing feedback on home security and home energy. It offers a complete system overview of an AAL solution in smart environments and discusses our lessons learned with the goal of assisting other researchers in the field in designing and deploying similar environments.