Elderly Health Service in China and Pervasive Computing

The aging of population is a worldwide common issue in many countries. On April 28th 2011, China’s State Statistical Bureau published the sixth national census bulletin No.1 which indicated that the old aged 60 and above in China had reached to 177.6 million, accounting for 13.26% of 1.3397 billion population, and the old aged 65 and above had reached to 118.8 million, accounting for 8.87% of total population. Such data above shows that China’s aging process is gradually accelerated. There are so many aging people who need long-term bed rest and could not take care of themselves. The number of old-age diseases was up to 78.01 million in 2010(the state financial expenditure is 751.3 million) and would be expected to reach 30,911 cases in 2050(the state financial expenditure will be 31.4 trillion). Chinese society has been facing serious challenges of aging. For sake of dealing with this challenge, on August 17th 2011, China’s State Council adopted the “China Aging Development” twelfth Five-Year Plan stated that we should positively deal with population aging problem and establish a home and community based, institute supported aging service system. We should accelerate the development of aging service, foster the industry and public welfare facility construction of aging service, encourage the social capital to set up an aging service institute equipped with nursing function where per thousand elderly own 30 beds. We should also expand the realm of aging service from general old-age care services to health care, aids configuration, spiritual solace, legal services, emergency assistance, etc.

In order to better serve elderly health service with technical support in China, we should learn about physiology, psychology and behavior, solve scientific issues about elderly people’s information technology services with cutting-edge technology such as medicine, information science, psychology, biomedical engineering. We should also make significant innovation model, provide with more job opportunities, develop content and applications in this emerging service, meanwhile, reduce medical costs, social pressure, and family contradiction.

Ubiquitous computing, known as Internet of Things, is essentially a comprehensive application of information technology. It is an expectation from elderly health service area to build a national data resource sharing, cloud monitoring and internet of things platform for the elderly. It is also an expectation to explore the new model of elderly health information service, breakthrough the limitation of the application about information technology in the realm of elderly health service, fulfill the elderly health information service system with multi-disciplinary subjects, virtualization, networking. We should establish a national elderly health system with low-cost, universal, personalized supportive services to meet the needs of society.

The research of ubiquitous computing technology has been carried out in the area of Chinese elderly health care, such as the 2010 year national 863 plan with the theme of biotechnology and medical technology, research of personal health information intelligence gathering and system development with the concentration on personal physiological information intelligence collection and care system, large-scale personal health information management and service system. There are other research projects such as building mixed BSN based on multi-communication methods; research about tracking and energy-aware problems; data fusion technology on BSN platform; BSN- based human activities monitoring; wearable physiological monitoring system at low load; human sense network and remote information support system at low cost; elderly mental intervention and artificial psychological methods and techniques.

Future research and development of ubiquitous computing (Internet of Things) in the area of Chinese elderly health service are as follows:

Improvement of older persons quality of life (sleep quality improvement, etc.); daily health care techniques focusing on elderly vulnerable physical fitness; methods and techniques about elderly psychological comfort; techniques of the elderly fall monitoring treatment and early warning, non-contact measurement and transmission methods and techniques of elderly body physiological indices(wearable technology), elderly chronic disease rehabilitation techniques and aids. We could expect that there will be significant progress and breakthrough in the areas of research above in the next five years.

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