First, Cause No Harm: Issues in Building Safe, Reliable and Trustworthy Elder Care Systems
Christopher A. Millert, Karen Zita Haigh, Wende L. Dewing · 2002
Emerging smart, adaptive, integrative reasoning and interaction management technologies---which we choose to call Interaction Design Systems---hold enormous promise to solve a growing international problem: the provision of care for elderly populations. There are, however, substantial novel challenges to providing care with this type of technology to this population. Specific challenges arise from providing safe, reliable and affordable systems for a highly diverse population that is not in a position to oversee or compensate for technology’s failings. These pressures should drive us toward specific IDS architectures designed for growth, expansion and tuning---both for the individual installation and over the lifespan of the technology. Furthermore, they should also, generally drive us toward initial delivery of systems that provide minimal automation capabilities, augmenting the supervisory role of human caregivers, rather than trying to replace them. Most importantly, any such system going into final use should strive to provide an accurate depiction of its capabilities and limitatons to both carogiver and elder. Issues in Elder Care Systems Data from the Administration on Aging shows that the number of people in the US over the age of 65 will double to 69.4 million by 2030--22 % of the population (AOA 1998). Historically, 43 % of people over the age of 65 enter a nursing home for at least one year, yet a Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) survey found that 30% of the elderly would "rather die " than do so (HCFA 1998). The financial and emotional trauma of such moves affects thousands of families yearly. Emerging home sensing and control technologies, integrated through emerging networking and information transfer protocols, and managed by intelligent, adaptive systems can be configured to transform a legacy home into something of a full-time caregiver by giving individual sensing and automation components an integrating ’mind’