Development of an Integrated Contactless Healthcare Service Platform Based on Intelligent IoT for the Successful Aging of the Elderly

The purpose of the living-lab clinical trials is to develop contactless digital health monitoring system and individually customizable health status feedback contents in order to improve self-care capacity and mental health of older adults who live alone. Also, the current trials aim to evaluate effectiveness and usability of the overall developed monitoring platform. The effectiveness evaluation will investigate whether the platform can be effective at detecting levels of health decline or improvements and connecting in-person healthcare services. The usability tests will focus on user-centeredness, efficiency, and usability for older adults and their community healthcare provider.

To accomplish the purposes, the platform was developed based on needs assessments and observations of living environments of community dwelling older adults using surveys and interviews. Community healthcare providers also participated interview on their needs as a caregiver and working conditions that need to be considered to develop applications and website for community caregivers.

The developed platform will be tested by younger adults for a pilot test and be tested by older adult users and their matched controls for the main clinical trials. The older adults participants will be recruited via postings and study information sessions at the community senior welfare center in Seoul, South Korea. Interested older adults and community healthcare service providers will be invited to participation in the trials. After recruiting the living lab older adults, age and gender matched control older adults will be recruited. Older adult participants will be those who are over 65 years old and do not have cognitive and sensory disorders (e.g., deafness or dementia) that may inhibit participation in the trials.

The living lab will be conducted for 6 weeks, starting with a 1-week adaptation period. Older adults will be asked to open the smartphone application in the morning; the application would automatically link them to a chatbot asking how they are doing and 2 questions on daily depressive symptoms.

After using the chatbot, the participants will be able to see their daily health status information for stress (via high frequency measure (HF) of heart rate variability (HRV)), sleep (via total sleep time and sleep fragmentation), and physical activity (via steps) on the previous day, compared to their own average during the first week of the living lab.