Fall care for Dementia Elderly
The project brief primarily revolves around choosing and understanding an ongoing pressing issue within the healthcare ecosystem in India, and appropriately propose a relevant solution for the same.
Within this realm, my project specifically tries to focus on the issue of Falls in care centres that provide institutional care for the elderly suffering from Dementia. The aim here is to develop a preventive and seamless approach for falls amongst the patients at the centre.
Dementia being one of the increasingly growing chronic ailment amongst the ageing population, is fast becoming a concern within the healthcare sector and a painful, cumbersome responsibility for the families of those suffering from it.
The chosen concept revolves around the idea of a monitoring based system that gathers fall patterns of each elderly individual at the care centre. This data is collected through a footwear accelerometer combined with a geolocator for tracking fall movements and location of fall.The data would primarily consist of fall patterns such as number of falls detected, site of falls, average time of falls etc. Analysing this set of data would help professionals understand fall triggers such as what the patient was doing before experiencing the fall,what are the health conditions making them more vulnerable to these falls, when do they require utmost attention/support from caregivers during the day,etc.
The deliverable designed for this project was an app-based system to be used primarily by the caregivers to attend to their daily patients based on continous monitoring and updates inorder to minimize triggering conditions for the patients. Since the caregivers spend maximum time with them, observations from their shifts and interactions, help other caregivers and doctors to tailor-make activities and treatment plans that would best suit their current condition.
This would subsequently help the doctors, psychologists and caregiving staff to create customised care plans for different groups of patients and segregate them based on their needs, disabilities and support requirement
