A Collaborative Patient-Carer Interface for Generating Home Based Rules for Self-Management

The wide spread prevalence of mobile devices, the decreasing costs of sensor technologies and increased levels of computational power have all lead to a new era in assistive technologies to support persons with Alzheimer’s disease. There is, however, still a requirement to improve the manner in which the technology is integrated into current approaches of care management. One of the key issues relating to this challenge is in providing solutions which can be managed by non-technically orientated healthcare professionals. Within the current work efforts have been made to develop and evaluate new tools with the ability to specify, in a non-technical manner, how the technology within the home environment should be monitored and under which conditions an alarm should be raised. The work has been conducted within the remit of a collaborative patient-carer system to support self-management for dementia. A visual interface has been developed and tested with 10 healthcare professionals. Results following a post evaluation of system usability have been presented and discussed.