The Center for Technology and Aging was established to advance the diffusion of technologies that help older adults lead healthier lives and maintain independence.
In July they published a paper detailing how they intend to spend some research money:
1) Medication Optimization refers to a wide variety of technologies designed to help manage medication information, dispensing, adherence, and tracking.
2) Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) includes a wide variety of technologies designed to manage and monitor a range of health conditions. Point-of-care (e.g., home) monitoring devices, such as weight scales, glucometers, and blood pressure monitors, may stand alone to collect and report health data, or they may become part of a fully integrated health data collection, analysis, and reporting system that communicates to multiple nodes of the health system and provides alerts when health conditions decline.
3) Assistive Technologies include a wide range of devices and equipment that help individuals perform a task or prevent injury. Assistive technologies promote independence as they compensate for sensory, physical, and cognitive impairments, and promote safety for vulnerable individuals as they detect and report health hazards.
4) Remote Training and Supervision (RTS) technologies can be used to train and supervise health and long-term care workers, and offer the potential for continuing education and quality assurance. Remote training means the student does not have to be physically located where the teaching is taking place – teaching and learning can be asynchronous or synchronous in time.
5) Disease Management (DM) is a patient-centric, coordinated care process for patients with specific health conditions, particularly chronic conditions and conditions that have a significant self-care component. DM programs include data mining processes to identify high risk patients within a population, use of evidence-based medical practice guidelines to support and treat individual patients, and a coordinated, data-informed system of patient outreach, feedback, and response.
6) Cognitive Fitness and Assessment technologies include thinking games and cognitive challenge regimens. Like physical fitness, the premise of cognitive fitness is that cognitive health can be maintained or improved if individuals exercise their brain. The emphasis with older adults is to prevent or delay Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Many cognitive fitness technologies are computer or Internet based, and include an assessment and tracking component.
7) Social Networking technologies enable the creation of social networks and focus on building communities of interest that help older adults communicate, organize, and share with other older adults and with their care providers. These are already gaining traction among older adults, and could be important both for the functions just described and for peer counseling and education that would complement the Remote Training and Supervision technologies described previously.
They've chosen to dedicate their funding to the first two categories. I find this strange, as these are the two areas that are also receiving the most private sector research funding--wouldn't it make more sense to dedicate their money to research areas that are being more or less ignored? Like, umm the other five on this list?
It's a really great thing that you've published this kind of topic here..This step help me a lot...
Posted by: chilipoker | 03/28/2011 at 09:22 AM