The population of the United States, as in most developed nations, is aging and is doing so at an increasing rate. This change in demographics is having a dramatic affect on the nation's healthcare delivery system and the related public costs. Long-term home care for the elderly is a major component of this cost trend. It has been proposed that the quality of home care can be significantly improved and the cost, as well as the time burden to family caregivers, significantly reduce through the application of new assisted living technologies that supports the remote monitoring of the elderly patient's activities, health and safety. This technology is expected to play a vital role in decreasing the cost and increasing the quality of elderly home-based care in the future. However, both the existing and more recently proposed assisted living technologies present one or more problems or limitations including being expensive and complex to install, use and maintain. This project presents a alternative approach called the Communications and Safety Monitoring System (CoSMoS). CoSMoS is intended to deliver comparably superior remote activity, health and safety monitoring, as well as communication functions, and do so at a much lower cost of installation, use and maintenance by integrating the best of breed network and hardware solutions available today. The CoSMoS platform will be an integrated hardware/software solution that is user-friendly, scalable and that will facilitate secure, non-intrusive communication and remote monitoring of elderly users by their caregivers, families and peers through a Web interface. The open and flexible nature of the CoSMoS platform will permit third parties, such a clinical researchers and medical device manufacturers, to develop new applications which can be easily and readily deployed over the same infrastructure thereby facilitating important applications and clinical research in the future.
This project proposes to develop a new, low cost, ubiquitous and easy to use application, called CoSMoS, to support the independent living of the elderly. It will accomplish this by facilitating communication and interaction between them and their peers, caregivers, friends and family members while also providing information to caregivers with which to evaluate their health, safety or the need for intervention.
