A closed-loop approach for improving the wellness of low-income elders at home using game consoles

As life expectancy in the industrialized world increases, so does the number of elders with chronic health conditions such as diabetes and congestive heart failure who require complex self-management routines. We present a motivational exercise gaming system whose goal is to increase the activity of elders with complex chronic conditions. Our gaming system, initially deployed unattended, showed discouraging results. Our second attempt addresses these shortcomings by coupling the gaming console with an application for presenting exercise results to remote clinicians and caregivers, and a smartphone- based application for collecting feedback and issuing alerts. HealthOS, a platform for developing healthcare applications, integrates all components of the applications.