Extraordinary advances in computing power, coupled with the reach of the Internet, promise to change many things about the way we live, including how we receive health and life care. So-called telemedicine, the remote application of healthcare using communication and computer technology, holds great promise for the Assisted Living (AL) community.

Telemedicine has the potential to allow AL individuals to remain in their own homes, or in assisted care rather than skilled care settings, by allowing doctors to remotely diagnose their conditions, prescribe remedies, and monitor their responses.

Computer and Internet based monitoring also has non medical applications to AL, such as allowing a person to keep an eye on the safety and well being of, say, an elderly mother without having to move her out of her own home.

Systems are being developed to automate monitoring, so that the computer itself can recognize potential health and safety problems, such as abnormally low or high activity levels, missed meals, or other anomalies, and can notify caregivers and healthcare providers.

Research issues in computer monitoring and telemedicine technology include:

• Privacy concerns. Computers have the potential to capture and transmit intimate information with the potential to be abused. The more sophisticated the monitoring in terms of information captured (e.g., health status), the greater the risk.
• Liability. Putting responsibility for monitoring the health and safety of humans into the "hands" of a machine raises obvious liability issues.
• Technology and infrastructure limitations. Personal computers and the Internet remain less than ideally reliable, and bandwidth continues to be very limited in many areas. While these problems will be overcome in time, today they still limit the applicability of these systems.

CALI is currently exploring research affiliations with a number of Smart House research projects that incorporate intelligent computer monitoring. One of the most promising is the Georgia Institute of Technology's Aware Home (pictured above).

CALI is also researching telemedicine systems such as...

Frontis, from a Greek company called ATKOSoft and CareLink, from Clinician Support Technology, a Massachusetts firm.