elDeRly-friEndly Alarm handling and MonitorING

Main Goal: To demonstrate new services to support independent living of elderly people

Program: ICT-PSP

Code: 225023

Description:

Project in the PSP-ICT Program from the European Comission, Information Society and Media

DREAMING brings together a set of services which, packaged together, allowxtending the independent life of elderly people while providing them with an equivalent level of safety as that they would enjoy in a protected environment such as an elderly home, and offering them a way of staying in touch with their loved ones even when the latter are away.

In addition, the DREAMING services facilitate the management of chronic conditions in a home setting reducing the need to use the expenses resources of acute hospitals to a bare minimum.

The main aim of DREAMING project is keeping elderly people in their home environment as long as their physical and mental conditions allow this. However, this goal cannot be achieved with technology only. So, the participating Social and Health Authorities will keep providing and enhance their offering of non-technology based services which are essential for supporting the autonomy of elderly people (e.g. visits by community nurses and social workers, psychological support, delivery of hot meals and shopping, special transportations for people with limited mobility, house cleaning, etc.).

Taking this into account, the core objectives of DREAMING are:

1. Enabling elderly people to continue to live in their home, without compromising with their level of safety, as long as they wish or until their physical and mental conditions make mandatory a transfer to an elderly or nursing home.
2. Providing elderly people with the simple though effective way of staying in touch with their loved ones even when they are physically away.
3. Increasing the appropriateness and the timeliness of interventions by health and social care professionals including emergency services. This translates not only into a better use of the limited resources available but also into reduced intrusion in elderly people s private life.
4. Containment of health and social care expenditure. Ongoing experiences have demostrated that monitoring technology, even when much more basic than that deployed by DREAMING, can delay by up to 18 moths in average the moment an elderly person has to be moved to a specialises institution. This translates into substantial savings for the Social Authorities. There is also a reach literature supporting the claim that chronic patients’ management in home settings can reduce the costs of healthcare but experiences in this field are not as conclusive as those for the social care. Demonstrating that savings are equally achievable in healthcare is one of the main challenges of DREAMING. To this end, three categories of chronic diseases have been selected: diabetes, COPD and heart failure.

As the chosen approach, the strategy of the DREAMING project will be centred around the goal of measuring the real impact of the monitoring and eInclusion services on the ality of life of the elderly people, the cost of social and health care delivered to them and on a number of clinical indicators.

With all above, the final goal of DREAMING is demonstrating, through pilots that last long enough to provide evidence of the impact of the services on a number of indicators, the benefits for the various categories of users and the economic sustainability of the services.

Partners