{"id":533,"date":"2011-07-06T01:49:37","date_gmt":"2011-07-06T05:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/?p=533"},"modified":"2011-07-06T01:50:33","modified_gmt":"2011-07-06T05:50:33","slug":"sensors-help-keep-the-elderly-safe-and-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/2011\/07\/06\/sensors-help-keep-the-elderly-safe-and-at-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Sensors Help Keep the Elderly Safe, and at Home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">(February 12, 2009, New York Times)<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2009\/02\/12\/us\/13senior_600.JPG\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"331\" \/> <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times. Joseph Hayduk, 86, who suffers from congestive heart failure, transmits  his clinical vital signs ever yday via a &#8220;HomMed Health Monitoring  System&#8221; to a Meridian Home Care office where a registered nurse tracks  his health.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They  are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable  them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency  room or nursing homes. <!--more--><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Bertha Branch, 78, discovered the power of a system called eNeighbor  when she fell to the floor of her Philadelphia apartment late one night  without her emergency alert pendant and could not phone for help.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">A wireless sensor under Ms. Branch\u2019s  bed detected that she had gotten  up. Motion detectors in her  bedroom and bathroom  registered that she  had not left the area in her usual pattern and relayed that information  to a central monitoring system, prompting  a call to her telephone to  ask if she was all right. When she did not answer, that incited  more  calls \u2014 to a neighbor, to the building manager and finally to 911, which  dispatched firefighters to break through her door. She had been on the  floor less than an hour when they arrived.<\/span><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Technologies like eNeighbor come with great promise of improved care  at lower cost and the backing of large companies like Intel and General Electric.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">But  the devices, which can be expensive, remain largely unproven and are  not usually covered by the government or private insurance plans.  Doctors are not trained to treat patients using remote data and have no  mechanism to be paid for doing so. And like all technologies, the  devices \u2014 including motion sensors, pill compliance detectors and  wireless devices that transmit data on blood pressure,  weight, oxygen and glucose levels \u2014 may have unintended consequences,  substituting electronic measurements for face-to-face contact with  doctors, nurses and family members.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Continue: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/02\/13\/us\/13senior.html?ref=eldercare\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/02\/13\/us\/13senior.html?ref=eldercare<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(February 12, 2009, New York Times) Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times. Joseph Hayduk, 86, who suffers from congestive heart failure, transmits his clinical vital signs ever yday via a &#8220;HomMed Health Monitoring System&#8221; to a Meridian Home Care &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/2011\/07\/06\/sensors-help-keep-the-elderly-safe-and-at-home\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3636,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41275,41262,40871,41276,41278],"tags":[42121],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions\/535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/eldercare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}