Multi-Modal Health and Activity Monitoring Framework for Elderly People at Home Ross Velentzas Andy Marsh Christos Biniaris VMW Solutions Ltd 9 Northlands Road - Whitenap Romsey - Hamsphire SO51 5RU - UK {firstname.name}@vmwsolutions.com tel. +44-(0)1794-500 145 fax. +44-(0)1794-522558 SWWS'08 Conference Contact Author: Ross Velentzas Jérémie Leguay Bertrand Ravera Mario Lopez-Ramos Eric Robert THALES Communications System Engineering Architectures 160 Boulevard de Valmy - BP 82 92704 Colombes Cedex - France {firstname.name}@fr.thalesgroup.com tel. +33-(0)1-46132346 fax. +33-(0)1-46132686 Abstract - Since the population of elderly people grows absolutely and in relation to the overall population in the world, the improvement of the quality of life of elderly people at home is of a great importance. This can be achieved through the development of generic technologies for managing their domestic ambient environment consisting of medical sensors, entertainment equipment, home automation systems and white goods, increasing their autonomy and safety. In this context, the provision intelligent interactive healthcare services will improve their daily life and allowing at the same time the continuous monitoring of their health and their effective treatment. This paper presents a multi-modal health and activity monitoring framework that enables abnormal event detection and long term evaluation of the health of the elderly people at home. We describe its integration with a Residential Gateway and provide details on the demonstration scenario developed, involving different kinds of sensing modules. This work is supported by the INHOME Project EU IST-045061-STP, http://www.ist-inhome.eu. Keywords - Healthcare Services, Elderly, Patient Monitoring, Assited Living at Home, Network Architecture and Design I. INTRODUCTION Europe's ageing population is a challenge for both its social and health systems. By 2020, a quarter of Europe’s population will be over 65. Spending on pensions, health and long-term care is expected to increase by 4-8% of GDP in coming decades, with total expenditures tripling by 2050. Similarly, by 2050, elderly people aged between 65-79 years old are expected to make up almost a third of the population which is a rise of 44 per cent compared to the start of the century. As for very elderly people (80+), their share of the total population could grow by 180 per cent over the same period. The majority of older people do not yet enjoy the benefits of the digital age such as low cost communications and online services that could support some of their real needs; only 10% use the internet. Severe vision, hearing or dexterity problems, frustrate many older peoples' efforts to engage in the information society. According to findings of the Center for Disease Control, nearly three quarters of elders over the age of 65 suffer of one or more chronic diseases. The majority of the growing elder population worldwide requires some degree of formal and/or informal care either due to loss of function or failing health as a result of ageing. The cost and burden of caring for elders is steadily increasing. If given the choice, many elders would prefer to lead an independent way of life in a residential setting with minimum intervention from the caregiver. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) programs are intended to address the needs of this increasing elderly population, to reduce innovation barriers of forthcoming promising markets for the various target group populations, but also to lower future social security costs on the long run. The major challenges of AAL research programs are to extend the time elderly people can spend in their home environment by ameliorating their level of autonomy and assisting them in carrying out simple or even more complicated everyday activities. It is a challenging issue for someone to deal with the special needs of elderly people especially in the home healthcare monitoring and treatment. The goal of the INHOME project is to provide the means for improving the quality of life of elderly people at home by developing generic technologies for managing their domestic ambient environment, consisted of white goods, entertainment equipment and home automation systems with the aim to increase their autonomy and safety [1], [2]. Monitoring of different types of chronic diseases of elderly people at an in-home environment relies heavily on patients’ self-monitoring of their disease conditions [3]. In recent years, telemonitoring systems, that allow the transmission of patient’s data to a hospital’s central database and offer immediate access to the data by the care providers, is of a great importance [4], [5]. From the healthcare delivery system point of view, an evolving picture of the patient at any given time will be produced, taking into account diagnoses and treatments, successes and setbacks [6]. The system would assess the current level of functionality and interactively coach the patient to higher levels of functionality. The consistency of continuous monitoring would eliminate much of the inaccuracy from the current random interactions between patients and physicians [7], [8]. Periodically and as determined by medical parameters