Planning Digital Transformation of Care in Rural Areas

Abstract

Abstract Over the next 30 years, one in three inhabitants of Europe and the USA will be 65 years old or older and nearly half will be 50+. The forms and structure of consumption will change, and the needs of older workers will change the production environment, as well as the requirements of distribution. Older people will become not only an engine of consumption in the silver economy but also valuable human resources, which will require them to adapt to the needs of their working environment. Older adults are exposed to risks of events leading to ill health and disability or even death. The rural population is even further away from service centres, which further prevents timely care and preventive care when needed. Smart silver villages using wireless sensors networks embedded in cyber-physical systems using Internet of Things (IoT) as an infrastructure, along with big data and machine learning can support older adults to stay independent longer in their community and mitigate the risk of events leading to ill health and disability. Ambient Assisted Living technologies offer older adults real-time control of activities in their villages and are expected to improve the control of decline in functional capacities of older adults and therefore, improve their quality of life. Ambient intelligence could enable older adults to live safer and thus, longer, in their villages and postpone or even prevent their relocation to a nursing home. Older adults suffer from frailty and decline in physical and cognitive functional capacities and therefore, experience decreased mobility, which can lead to difficulties with activities of daily living. The central gap found in the literature review is a lack of the common dataset for forecasting the needs of older adults and measurement of quality of technologies embedded in smart villages. We need a proper recording of patterns of decline in functional capacities which can cause events leading to ill health and disability. Development of technologies in the last 20 years has created possibilities for developing various models, tools and techniques for supporting older adults to live safer lives and be more well-connected in their communities. Based on these developments, we propose the multi-state competing risk model for control of events leading to ill health and disabilities and show how to forecast the growth of these needs. This approach is especially important for rural areas where the distances and time delays between detection and reaction are too long.