An eldercare electronic health record system for predictive health assessment

Many older adults in the US prefer to live independently for as long as they are able, despite the onset of conditions such as frailty and dementia. Sensor networks have emerged in the last decade, together with telehealth and internet based electronic health records (EHR), as a possible solution to older adult health monitoring. Many commercial solutions for EHRs, telehealth monitoring and sensor networks are available but, as far as we know, no integrated system exists. In this paper we present an integrated eldercare EHR system (IEEHR) that merges health data with sensor and telehealth (vital signs) measurements. The benefit of an EEHR system is three fold: provides physicians a wider gamut of tools for chronic disease management, reduces nursing workload and allows the development of health context aware algorithms for predictive health assessment. In this paper we present the integrated EEHR system we are developing at TigerPlace, an assisted living community in Columbia, Missouri. Several examples of possible applications are also presented.