As life expectancy grows, new challenges arise relating to all aspects of life: clinical, cognitive, functional, social and mental. Also, the ageing population becomes more central in society as the ratio of the elderly in the population grows and they become more active in the society. On the other hand, age-related disabilities in the elderly affect the family's ability to care for their parents, and also affect the workforce and the economy.
Prevention, early detection, diagnosis and timely intervention are crucial for management of these large populations, in health and disease, maintaining healthy active ageing with high quality of life. This requires implementation of new models of care and systems for large-scale screening, as well as reliable technology-based assessment and intervention methods; especially in the individual's everyday settings. These could enable all stakeholders to use and manage the valuable information they produce to foster better care and prolong healthy, independent living, while enabling the healthcare systems to cope with the challenge professionally and financially.
Today, the growing use of smart, unobtrusive and seamless technologies, wearables and the at-home setting, serves mainly for wellbeing and entertainment purposes. However, slowly new technologies are emerging for early detection of age-related symptoms along with technologies for intervention among people with age-related conditions including virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). The healthcare systems have a growing need for systems that enable holistic approaches for treatment of age-related conditions, supporting active and healthy ageing and interactions with the patients, their caregivers and healthcare professionals. The needs are at the level of infrastructure that will facilitate the implementation of innovative solutions that can be adapted to specific care system or user needs and in specific solutions addressing the various aspects of age-related diseases.
As shown throughout this Special Issue the treatment of the ageing population is a multidisciplinary task and requires solutions that combine innovative treatment approaches and development of innovative technologies that will enable detection, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up; using different channels of communication and treatment methodologies. One of the ways to overcome the barriers seen in this issue is presented in the invited paper, ‘Avatars and Virtual Agents – Relationship Interfaces for the Elderly.’ This presents an alternative method of interaction to overcome the communication and technological barriers that exist in treatment for the elderly. This domain has been developing in recent years and is now being implemented in healthcare. The avatar agent will enable the caregiver to personalise communication as well as the treatment and relate also to the potential emotional problems of the patient such as solitude and age-related depression. We believe that this is an example of the future technologies that will become part of the holistic treatment addressing complex needs in the elderly population.
In this issue, we collected several papers presenting research and developed solutions across these facets and gives an insight into the latest research in this area.
The paper, ‘Design and implementation of a standardized framework for the management of a wireless body network in an mHealth environment’, relates to wearable infrastructure and presents a framework that facilitates the development of mHealth applications and management of the communications with biomedical sensors, as well as the processing and storage of data regardless of the sensor type. Such infrastructures will enable delivery of modular services adapted to the user.
‘Community-Based Trials of Mobile Solutions for the Detection and Management of Cognitive Decline’, relates to one of the major barriers in treatment of elderly people and the need to personalise not only the treatment, but also the ways of treatment delivery, use of technologies and communication.
The paper, ‘Improving Adult Day Services through Technology: a User based Approach’, discusses services for an aging population in the community, and the need for personalisation of treatment according to a patient's skills, characteristics of user assessment of the elderly over time to generate knowledge about their psychological and physical conditions, and about the general factors that accelerate/delay deterioration caused by age. This will allow us to tailor the solutions to the user according to changing needs over time.
‘PD_Manager: An mHealth platform for Parkinson's disease patient management’ presents the future solutions that will address patient's needs, caregiver needs and physicians. Although this paper related to a specific population of Parkinson disease it represents the overall solution combining unobtrusive sensors, data analytics, DSS systems for patient caregiver and healthcare professionals and a platform that serves researchers for future developments.
The last paper, ‘Effects of Aging and Alzheimer Disease on Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF): A Challenge for Event-Related fMRI’, represents the extensive work done in the basic research for early diagnosis of age-related diseases. These techniques, along with the innovative technologies for intervention will enable us to cope with the burden of care and provide better care for the elderly population.
In conclusion, early detection, development and implementation of solutions for the elderly requires research and development of adaptive solutions as well as research for better understanding of the barriers and ways to communicate with the elderly population and the implementation processes of technologies for the elderly. For this mission the collaboration between end users (e.g. elderly population, care providers and healthcare organisations) and industry developing the technological solutions, can leverage knowledge and innovation for the benefit of the elderly population and the care providers.