An Intelligent Healthcare System for Residential Aged Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

There are many healthcare possibilities for the elderly, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and home-based care. However, in times of COVID-19, most home-based elderly people did not have sufficient supplies or healthcare as usual. Fulfilling their desire for an independent lifestyle while protecting them from falls, sudden illness, or accidents is difficult. This study represents a smart system for coping with this problem in public healthcare. The existing methods for residential aged care (RAC), such as fall detection, focus on personal profiles and physical symptoms records or use a collaborative filtering method to notify caregivers or family members that the elderly person may be at a high level of risk. However, these methods have many limitations in times of COVID-19, including insufficient risk factors, problems gathering information from mobile sensors, and issues with handling human variability. This study proposes a new method for RAC in times of COVID-19 called the Intelligent Healthcare Agent System (IHAS), which, unlike the old system, incorporates context information, such as indoor and outdoor (IO), standing and lying (SL), and resting and moving (RM). IHAS integrates diverse mobile sensor data and utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into the research model and learning-oriented prototype system that can manage human variability. Ultimately, this study’s findings should contribute to the existing research and industrial applications of RAC, as well as offer new avenues of study in future research.