This is one of the questions Brian Dolan with Mobihealthnews asked George McGinnis with the Assistive Technology Programme at the NHS Connecting for Health in the UK. The short answer is “yes”.
“The UK starts from a position where we have state provided social care. With that we had a history of using technology and social care to move people out of residential care homes and keep them in their own homes. There is a significant infrastructure there already” said MacGinnis. “In terms of penetration rate, we have upwards of 1 million people who enjoy some form of remote monitoring technology and around 300,000 or more ‘smart homes’ are already out there and wired. That’s probably very different from what is classically talked about more often in places like the US, for instance, in terms of chronic disease management. [For chronic disease management] we are starting out along with everyone else — we are still in the stage of early pilots.”
Below is the full video interview:
No one in the UK’s telehealth/telecare community knows what Mr MacGinnis meant by 300,000 ‘smart homes’, unless he meant homes provided with telecare remote monitoring systems. However, as an item on the Telecare Aware site points out, ‘smart home’ is not an appropriate use of the term in that context. Read “Telecare ‘Smart Homes’ Nowhere Near Smart Enough” on http://www.telecareaware.com/index.php/smart.html