Person:

Kim, Sunyoung

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is the most common reason for hospitalization in people aged 65 years and older in the United States. Especially, a very high rate of unplanned readmissions within 30 days of discharge due to CHF occurs a heavy associated financial burden and degraded quality of care. To effectively prevent CHF readmission and improve overall care, this paper proposes SwellFit, a novel wearable sensor that helps outpatients to proactively monitor a physical symptom of worsening CHF, ankle swelling. Using a flex sensor, SwellFit monitors changes in ankle curvature as an indication of swelling. A pilot test with 4 adults showed that SwellFit successfully distinguish noise data and motion artifacts from ankle swelling. Collaborating with cardiac experts, we are currently planning to test SwellFit with hospitalized CHF patients who have swelling conditions to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of SwellFit on detecting swelling from ankle curvature.

Mobile technologies offer the potential for enhanced healthcare, especially by supporting self-management of chronic care. For these technologies to impact chronic care, they need to work for older adults, because the majority of people with chronic conditions are older. A major challenge remains: integrating the appropriate use of such technologies into the lives of older adults. We investigated how older adults would accept mobile technologies by interviewing two groups of older adults (technology adopters and non-adopters who aged 60+) about their experiences and perspectives to mobile technologies. Our preliminary results indicate that there is an additional phase, the intention to learn, and three relating factors, self-efficacy, conversion readiness, and peer support, that significantly influence the acceptance of mobile technologies among the participants, but are not represented in the existing models. With these findings, we propose a tentative theoretical model that extends the existing theories to explain the ways in which our participants came to accept mobile technologies. Future work should investigate the validity of the proposed model by testing our findings against younger people.

As population ages and chronic disease increases, new models of health care delivery are inevitable. We propose to interweave the concept of chronic care management into social infrastructure to better support elderly individuals with chronic diseases. As an exemplar, we chose and investigated Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), since it is one of serious health threats among the elderly population in western society. From a preliminary investigation of literature and prior work, we suggest two implications for social care of chronic patients: increased social awareness, and social knowledge base. This is not an exhaustive list of implications, but a starting point to open up discussions towards social care for chronic diseases.