Archbishop's web site Denver Catholic Register Parishes Catholic Pastoral Center
December 4, 2002
Technology may provide breakthroughs to health care challenges
By Willy Thorn
(CNS) — Technology's impact in health care is growing and this may prove to be good news for seniors, according to an expert.
Dr. Binh Q. Tran, assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department and director of the Home Care Technologies Program of The Catholic University of America in Washington, said technology could provide some substantial solutions to health care dilemmas in the near future.
"Not unlike other groups, seniors present key challenges to the design and development of technologies for improving access and delivery of health-care services," he said.
"Acceptance and adoption of technologies is somewhat different" for the elderly than "the Generation X-ers," he said.
"Another challenge of this group," he added, "is that most are past their prime earning years." Technology, he noted, must be carefully designed and affordable for a population that has a limited disposable income and is "very judicious with regard to how it is spent."
"Another key challenge is that a significant proportion of seniors have some form of acquired disability," he said, including "health-related events, cognitive or mental disabilities, mobility issues, arthritis, vision and hearing impairments."
Fortunately, seniors, as a group, seem to be accepting of technological advancements and open to the possibilities they present, Tran said.
Two areas of senior health care that could see significant growth, he said, are telecommunications and "smart" in-home care.
"The explosion in telecommunications and computer information technologies have and will continue to have a strong impact on senior health care services," Tran said.
He also pointed to the Internet as a field with tremendous potential for advancement.
"The Internet is a reliable medium for exchanging information, data and also telephony," he said. "This medium is also very useful for providing education to patients and their caregivers. The bottleneck that still needs to be figured out is how to provide affordable broadband access to seniors ... where they live."
Tran said leaders in the field are also looking to develop "virtual communities" on the Internet for seniors who are without transportation.
Hardware, like laptops, PalmPilots and PalmPC products, videophones and cellphones, can also play a significant role in health care, Tran said, adding that many of these innovations are being adopted by home-health agencies to provide better communication between the home and health care facility.
"Many medical device companies are integrating modem technology into their products to enable transmission of vital signs and health information from the home to a remote clinic for improved health monitoring," he said.
According to Tran, "smart homes" will "play a key role in transforming health care and promoting independent living for seniors."
"To think," he said, "we all live in 'dumb' homes that really haven't changed from the early 1900s technologically."
He said that Catholic University is developing "prototyping home automation systems imbedded within simulated living environments to examine how users interact with technology in their home ... and how the home can interact with the users."
He noted, for example, that they are working on a "smart trash can" in which the garbage receptacle scans for barcodes of consumed products by a potential diabetic living at home. This information, he added, can be fed back to a central computer in the home to tally nutritional and other vital information for diabetes management, provide educational content to reinforce proper diet, note on an electronic grocery list that that item needs to be replenished and even have the list sent to an online grocery vendor for automated delivery.
He also pointed to tests imbedding sensors into clothing for real-time monitoring and wellness and virtual reality technologies that can provide new openings in exercise therapy as just two examples being investigated.
"There are strong indications that devices" on the horizon "will help us move closer to a 'preventive' model of health care rather than an 'incidence' driven model," he said.
"A smart home can truly be a benefit to seniors and assist in keeping them living at home longer," Tran said.
Hopefully, he said, the smart home technology will follow in the footsteps of other advanced health care technology that has been successful on the open market, such as automated home blood-pressure devices and glucose monitoring devices for diabetics.
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