The Mayo Clinic will conduct a telehealth initiative to study to the care and cost benefits of in-home monitoring of patients with chronic diseases. They are partnering with GE Healthcare to implement Intel’s home monitoring technology Intel Health Guide.
During the year-long study 200 high-risk patients over the age of 60 with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, heart failure, lung disease, will use a medical monitoring device to take their vitals: blood pressure, weight, sugar levels and peak air flow. This information is collected in a central database at the Mayo Clinic where the patient’s primary medical team will have secure web access. Clinicians will also be able to use the videoconferencing system to observe and communicate with their patients.
Last year GE Healthcare and Intel formed a partnership to work together to develop and market home-based telehealth technologies. The companies are expected to invest more than $250 million over the next 5 years.
NielsenWire Online reports that, while people 65 and older still make up less than 10 percent of the active Internet universe, their numbers are on the rise. In the last five years, the number of seniors actively using the Internet has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the growth of women in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.
Not only are more people 65 and older heading online, but they are also spending more time on the Web. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11 percent in the last five years, from approximately 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.
“The over 65 crowd represents about 13% of the total population and with this increase in online usage, they are beginning to catch up with their offline numbers,” notes Chuck Schilling, research director, agency & media, Nielsen’s online division. “Looking at what they’re doing online, it makes sense they’re engaged in many of the same activities that dominate other age segments – e-mail, sharing photos, social networking, checking out the latest news and weather – and it’s worth noting that a good percentage of them are spending time with age-appropriate pursuits such as leisure travel, personal health care and financial concerns.”
The number one online activity? Checking personal email. Viewing or printing online maps and checking the weather online were the second and third most popular online activities, with 68.6 and 60.1 percent, respectively.
According to a survey by the Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation: “Technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional. Technology can help to enable the human connection in health care and the internet is turning up the information network’s volume.”
Key Findings from the survey:
61% of America adults look online for health information.
American adults continue to turn to traditional sources of health information, even as many of them deepen their engagement with the online world.
The social life of health information is robust.
A majority of e-patients access user-generated health information.
Social networking sites are used only sparingly for health queries and updates.
Online health inquiries have an impact on decisions or action and there are clearly more positive experiences than negative ones.
Internet users report a surge of interest in information about exercise and fitness.
Change is coming, whether through the spread of wireless devices or generational shifts.
Light switches, TV remote controls and even house keys could become a thing of the past thanks to brain-computer interface (BCI) technology being developed in Europe that lets users perform everyday tasks with thoughts alone.
The technology, which was demonstrated at CeBIT in Hannover in March, provides an innovative way of controlling the interconnected electronic devices that will populate the smart homes of the future, granting increased autonomy to people with physical disabilities as well as pleasing TV channel-surfing couch potatoes.
“The BCI lets people turn on lights, change channels on the TV or open doors just by thinking about it,” explains Christoph Guger, the CEO of Austrian medical engineering company g.tec that developed the application.
g.tec teamed up with a group of international universities and research institutes as part of the EU-funded Presenccia project to incorporate its BCI technology into virtual environments. As part of the project a fully functioning smart home was created in virtual reality (VR).
“It has a kitchen, bathroom, living room… everything a normal home would have. People are able to move through it just by thinking about where they wanted to go,” Guger says.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment is used to monitor electrical activity in a user’s brain via electrodes attached to their scalp. After a period of training, the system learns to identify the distinctive patterns of neuronal activity produced when they imagine walking forwards, flicking on a light switch or turning up the radio.
