Futuring Digital Health and Wellness

The growing of ageing population worldwide and the need to concentrate research efforts on a specific target group motivate our research and focus on frail ageing people with chronic disease and physical/cognitive deficiencies. The primary goal is to maintain frail and dependant people in their own home and delay as much as possible their placement in a nursing home, through reliable assistive technologies, to maximize their physical and mental function, and to continue to engage in social networks with the community, so that they can continue to lead an independent and purposeful life. Today, providing assistive services for frail and dependant people could be done following two ways: the first axis consists on seeking assistive technologies dedicated not only to end-users, but also, and even mainly, to helper around the user (relatives, neighbours, caregivers,..) to supervise Activities of Daily Living (ADL). The second axis could be to concentrate on rehabilitation and coaching solutions targeting people with chronic disease (ex. diabetes type 2) helping them modify their lifestyle to manage their health conditions. Such systems focus mainly on developing serious games deployable at home and connected to regional or national health information systems (e.g. the shared medical file database in France). Consequently, in both options, the development cost is high, and this is also the reason that most smart home projects are still at the research lab level worldwide. There are efforts trying to transfer the research lab demonstration prototypes into homes or nursing homes, but migrating systems from a well controlled research lab environment into a much more complex real-world environment introduces tremendous challenges in terms of correctness, reliability and fault-tolerant requirements. Our objective is to promote demonstration guidelines and lessons learned in order to reach this goal. The presented work focuses on the quality of life of ageing people having cognitive and functional limitations, combined with diabetes type 2, and on recent achievements realised in France and Singapore.