Virtual Carer: personalized support for informal caregivers of elderly

Resumen

Due to the progressive ageing of the world population, new care models are required to maintain elderly's quality of life. These models should include the informal carer (IC) who usually lacks of skills and knowledge to develop assistance tasks. Therefore, support in decision making and informal carer empowerment are crucial to prevent and reduce the burden and stress suffered in the elderly care provided. This paper describes the Virtual Carer system aimed at supporting IC with a set of recommendations adapted to problems suffered in the activities of daily care developed or in daily activities of the older adult. The activities are detected by a set of sensors deployed in older adult's home or a questionnaires to be filled by the IC. The recommendation are sent to IC by means of text messages or email as well as learning videos accessible from e-learning system. As example, a particular use case of the Virtual Carer has been presented to show the information process of problems in IC's sleep patterns.