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Supportive Systems for Active and Healthy Aging

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A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Digital Health".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2023) | Viewed by 17550

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Oscar Ribeiro

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Guest Editor

CINTESIS@RISE, Center for Health Technology and Services Research at the Associate Laboratory RISE—Health Research Network, Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal
Interests: active aging; healthy aging; oldest-old; centenarians; longevity; mental health; dementia; informal care
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Anabela Silva

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Assistant Guest Editor

Center for Health Technology and Services Research (CINTESIS), Superior School of Health Sciences of the University of Aveiro, Aveiro, 3810-193, Portugal
Interests: active aging; pain; functioning; non-pharmacological pain management; usability; mHealth; eHealth

Prof. Dr. Nelson P. Rocha

E-Mail Website
Assistant Guest Editor

Institute of Electronics and Informatics Engineering (IEETA), Department of Medical Sciences of the University of Aveiro, Aveiro, 3810-193, Portugal
Interests: active aging; functioning; cognitive training; usability; ambient assisted living; eHealth

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The world population is aging in an unprecedented manner and the challenges for improving the lives of older adults, their families, and the communities in which they live are currently a strong political priority. The World Health Organization has recently endorsed the proposal for a ‘Decade for Healthy Ageing’ (2020–2030) that provides a set of priorities ranging from policy creations that enable people to live long and healthy lives, to collecting better global data on healthy aging, aligning the actual needs of older people with the health systems, and ensuring long-term care services that also support caregivers.

Within such a scope, developing supportive systems for older adults by means of digital solutions that are as user-centred and as personalized as possible has been a challenge for researchers from different backgrounds. Remote monitoring or online interventions targeting physical and mental health promotion constitute examples of the use of information and communication technologies aiming to allow older adults with diverse dependency levels to stay at home and remain active for as long as possible.

This Special Issue focuses on research on supportive systems for older adults, including a wide range of topics that focus on the promotion of aging in place solutions within an active and healthy aging approach. Topics of interest include but are not limited to research on digital solutions specifically targeting older adults’ autonomy, independence, health, wellbeing, and social connectedness.

Dr. Oscar Ribeiro
Dr. Anabela Silva
Prof. Dr. Nelson P. Rocha
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Active aging
Aging in place
Assistive technologies
Assistive robotics systems
Co-design solutions
Digital health solutions
eHealth interventions
Functioning
ICT home-based care
Independent and autonomous living
Integrated care solutions
Needs assessment
Smart living environments
Social engagement platforms
Supportive systems
Technology-mediated interventions
Wellbeing

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

Jump to: Review

21 pages, 6232 KiB

Open AccessArticle

HMM-Based Action Recognition System for Elderly Healthcare by Colorizing Depth Map

by Ye Htet, Thi Thi Zin, Pyke Tin, Hiroki Tamura, Kazuhiro Kondo and Etsuo Chosa

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(19), 12055; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912055 - 23 Sep 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1701

Abstract

Addressing the problems facing the elderly, whether living independently or in managed care facilities, is considered one of the most important applications for action recognition research. However, existing systems are not ready for automation, or for effective use in continuous operation. Therefore, we have developed theoretical and practical foundations for a new real-time action recognition system. This system is based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) along with colorizing depth maps. The use of depth cameras provides privacy protection. Colorizing depth images in the hue color space enables compressing and visualizing depth data, and detecting persons. The specific detector used for person detection is You Look Only Once (YOLOv5). Appearance and motion features are extracted from depth map sequences and are represented with a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). These HOG feature vectors are transformed as the observation sequences and then fed into the HMM. Finally, the Viterbi Algorithm is applied to recognize the sequential actions. This system has been tested on real-world data featuring three participants in a care center. We tried out three combinations of HMM with classification algorithms and found that a fusion with Support Vector Machine (SVM) had the best average results, achieving an accuracy rate (84.04%). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Supportive Systems for Active and Healthy Aging)

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32 pages, 3252 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bedtime Monitoring for Fall Detection and Prevention in Older Adults

by Jesús Fernández-Bermejo Ruiz, Javier Dorado Chaparro, Maria José Santofimia Romero, Félix Jesús Villanueva Molina, Xavier del Toro García, Cristina Bolaños Peño, Henry Llumiguano Solano, Sara Colantonio, Francisco Flórez-Revuelta and Juan Carlos López

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(12), 7139; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19127139 - 10 Jun 2022

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2570

Abstract

Life expectancy has increased, so the number of people in need of intensive care and attention is also growing. Falls are a major problem for older adult health, mainly because of the consequences they entail. Falls are indeed the second leading cause of unintentional death in the world. The impact on privacy, the cost, low performance, or the need to wear uncomfortable devices are the main causes for the lack of widespread solutions for fall detection and prevention. This work present a solution focused on bedtime that addresses all these causes. Bed exit is one of the most critical moments, especially when the person suffers from a cognitive impairment or has mobility problems. For this reason, this work proposes a system that monitors the position in bed in order to identify risk situations as soon as possible. This system is also combined with an automatic fall detection system. Both systems work together, in real time, offering a comprehensive solution to automatic fall detection and prevention, which is low cost and guarantees user privacy. The proposed system was experimentally validated with young adults. Results show that falls can be detected, in real time, with an accuracy of 93.51%, sensitivity of 92.04% and specificity of 95.45%. Furthermore, risk situations, such as transiting from lying on the bed to sitting on the bed side, are recognized with a 96.60% accuracy, and those where the user exits the bed are recognized with a 100% accuracy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Supportive Systems for Active and Healthy Aging)

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9 pages, 1258 KiB

Open AccessArticle

BRAINCODE for Cognitive Impairment Diagnosis in Older Adults: Designing a Case–Control Pilot Study

by Pedro Rocha, Paulina Clara Dagnino, Ronan O’Sullivan, Aureli Soria-Frisch and Constança Paúl

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(9), 5768; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095768 - 9 May 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2246

Abstract

An early, extensive, accurate, and cost-effective clinical diagnosis of neurocognitive disorders will have advantages for older people and their families, but also for the health and care systems sustainability and performance. BRAINCODE is a technology that assesses cognitive impairment in older people, differentiating normal from pathologic brain condition, based in an EEG biomarkers evaluation. This paper will address BRAINCODE’s pilot design, which intends to validate its efficacy, to provide guidelines for future studies and to allow its integration on the SHAPES platform. It is expected that BRAINCODE confirms a regular clinical diagnosis and neuropsychologic tests to discriminate ‘normal’ from pathologic cognitive decline and differentiates mild cognitive impairment from dementia in older adults with/without subjective cognitive complains. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Supportive Systems for Active and Healthy Aging)

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20 pages, 625 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Phyx.io: Expert-Based Decision Making for the Selection of At-Home Rehabilitation Solutions for Active and Healthy Aging

by Javier Dorado Chaparro, Jesús Fernández-Bermejo Ruiz, María José Santofimia Romero, Xavier del Toro García, Rubén Cantarero Navarro, Cristina Bolaños Peño, Henry Llumiguano Solano, Félix Jesús Villanueva Molina, Anabela Gonçalves Silva and Juan Carlos López

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(9), 5490; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095490 - 1 May 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2009

Abstract

While the importance of physical activity in older adults is beyond doubt, there are significant barriers limiting the access of older adults to physical exercise. Existing technologies to support physical activity in older adults show that, despite their positive impacts on health and well-being, there is in general a lack of engagement due to the existing reluctance to the use of technology. Usefulness and usability are two major factors for user acceptance along with others, such as cost, privacy, equipment and maintenance requirements, support, etc. Nevertheless, the extent to which each factor impacts user acceptance remains unclear. Furthermore, other stakeholders, besides the end users, should be considered in the decision-making process to develop such technologies, including caregivers, therapists and technology providers. In this paper, and in the context of physical rehabilitation and exercise at home, four different alternatives with incremental characteristics have been defined and considered: a software-based platform for physical rehabilitation and exercise (Alternative 1), the same software platform with a conventional RGB camera and no exercise supervision (Alternative 2), the same software platform with a convention RGB camera and exercise supervision (Alternative 3) and finally, the same software platform with a depth camera and exercise supervision (Alternative 4). A multiple attribute decision-making methodology, based on the ordinal priority approach (OPA) method, is then applied using a group of experts, including end users, therapists and developers to rank the best alternative. The attributes considered in this method have been usefulness, cost, ease of use, ease of technical development, ease of maintenance and privacy, concluding that Alternative 3 has been ranked as the most appropriate. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Supportive Systems for Active and Healthy Aging)

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13 pages, 389 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Promoting Reminiscences with Virtual Reality Headsets: A Pilot Study with People with Dementia

by Tiago Coelho, Cátia Marques, Daniela Moreira, Maria Soares, Paula Portugal, António Marques, Ana Rita Ferreira, Sónia Martins and Lia Fernandes

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17(24), 9301; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17249301 - 12 Dec 2020

Cited by 31 | Viewed by 5175

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the feasibility and effects of promoting reminiscences, using virtual reality (VR) headsets for viewing 360° videos with personal relevance, with people with dementia. A study with a mixed methods design was conducted with nine older adults diagnosed with dementia. Interventions consisted of four sessions, in which the participants’ engagement, psychological and behavioral symptoms, and simulation sickness symptoms were evaluated. Neuropsychiatric symptomatology and quality of life were measured pre- and post-intervention. Caregivers were interviewed regarding the effect of the approach. In most cases, participants appeared to enjoy the sessions, actively explored the 360° environment, and shared memories associated with the depicted locations, often spontaneously. There were no cases of significant increases in simulator sickness and psychological and behavioral symptoms during sessions, with only some instances of minor eyestrain, fullness of head, anxiety, irritability, and agitation being detected. Although there were no significant changes in the measured outcomes after intervention, the caregivers assessed the experience as potentially beneficial for most participants. In this study, promoting reminiscences with VR headsets was found to be a safe and engaging experience for people with dementia. However, future studies are required to better understand the added value of immersion, using VR, in reminiscence therapy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Supportive Systems for Active and Healthy Aging)

Review

Jump to: Research

18 pages, 1389 KiB

Open AccessReview

Methodological Quality of User-Centered Usability Evaluation of Ambient Assisted Living Solutions: A Systematic Literature Review

by Rute Bastardo, Ana Isabel Martins, João Pavão, Anabela Gonçalves Silva and Nelson Pacheco Rocha

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(21), 11507; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111507 - 1 Nov 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2253

Abstract

This study aimed to determine the methodological quality of user-centered usability evaluation of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions by (i) identifying the characteristics of the AAL studies reporting on user-centered usability evaluation, (ii) systematizing the methods, procedures and instruments being used, and (iii) verifying if there is evidence of a common understanding on methods, procedures, and instruments for user-centered usability evaluation. An electronic search was conducted on Web of Science, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore databases, combining relevant keywords. Then, titles and abstracts were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the full texts of the eligible studies were retrieved and screened for inclusion. A total of 44 studies were included. The results show a great heterogeneity of methods, procedures, and instruments to evaluate the usability of AAL solutions and, in general, the researchers fail to consider and report relevant methodological aspects. Guidelines and instruments to assess the quality of the studies might help improving the experimental design and reporting of studies on user-centered usability evaluation of AAL solutions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Supportive Systems for Active and Healthy Aging)

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