Challenges, Opportunities, and Solutions for Ubiquitous Eldercare

The growing percentage of elderly people within society calls for novel healthcare services to enhance elders day-life independence. Ubiquitous technologies create novel opportunities to push further health services into the environments where elders live/move and to build first response emergency teams to support elderly people any-where and any-time. However, advanced healthcare services provisioning raises new challenges. In particular, it is necessary to handle properly ad-hoc emergency groups formation and group members collaboration. The paper presents a group management system (AGAPE) that exploits context-awareness, i.e., the visibility of information, such as user location and profiles, to support both the dynamic formation of ad-hoc first response groups and the group member interactions required to plan, coordinate and distribute emergency activities among the various entities. The paper describes also an emergency application prototype, built on top of AGAPE, that provides outdoor emergency support to elderly users in critical situations, such as heart strokes.