MEBI 591a Personal Health informatics Seminar
May 8, 2007


Matthai Philipose
Intel Research, Seattle, WA.

"Technology for Long-Term Care: Scaling Eldercare to the Next Billion"

Long-term care of the elderly is labor-intensive: caregiving relies overwhelmingly on the "high touch" presence of caregivers. The cost of high touch is unsustainable given current demographic trends worldwide. Without dramatic breakthroughs in the cost of care, over half of all elders are expected to be without adequate care within a generation. In this talk, I will discuss how emerging automated activity monitoring technologies can help scale the practice of care in three ways: helping elders function independently using cognitive orthotics, reducing burden on caregivers via remote monitoring and notification, and improving interactions with clinicians via clinically valid behavioral metrics. Technology is only a piece of the puzzle. I will explain why clinicians, service providers, state workers and technologists need to coordinate towards this goal. Using examples of some recent exciting proposals, I will speculate on what form the coordination may take, and what the opportunities are.