Abstract
The concept of the information society is now a common one, as opposed to the industrial society that dominated the economy during the last years. It is assumed that all sectors should have access to information and reap its benefits. Elderly people are, in this respect, a major challenge, due to their lack of interest in technological progress and their lack of knowledge regarding the potential benefits that information society technologies might have on their lives. The Naviga Project (An Open and Adaptable Platform for the Elderly and Persons with Disability to Access the Information Society) is a European effort, whose main goal is to design and develop a technological platform allowing elder people and persons with disability to access the internet and the information society. Naviga also allows the creation of services targeted to social networks, mind training and personalized health care. In this paper we focus on the health care and information services designed on the project, the technological platform developed and details of two representative elements, the virtual reality hand rehabilitation and the health information intelligent system.
Highlights
Today, developed countries have great difficulties with effective health services and quality of care in a context marked by the population ageing
In the framework of the Naviga project, we have chosen a health service for hand rehabilitation based on Virtual Reality for the improvement of the patient's outcome
It is possible to perform annotation via OBA service ontologies, currently the only one that is fully integrated is Medlineplus Health Topics. Integration of this module with the Naviga Common Access Platform (CAP) through SOA provides an intelligent mechanism for the recognition of medical concepts especially relevant for older people, for whom it might be interesting to have their own medical history stored into the platform
Summary
Today, developed countries have great difficulties with effective health services and quality of care in a context marked by the population ageing This general world trend, that can be seen, has dramatic effects on both public and private health systems, as well as on emergency medical services, mainly due to an increase in costs and a higher demand for more and improved benefits for users, as well as for increased personal mobility. The elderly demonstrate poor performance on tests, including reaction times, motor coordination, short-term and complex or abstract conceptualization These changes result in a decline in the quality of life. The consortium comprises five SMEs conducting research (investment min. 20% of annual turnover in R & D), a university and two end users are involved in the project (an hospital and a daily care health centre located in Madrid area)
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