Question: What do you get when you mix doctors, nurses, health care providers, computer specialists and engineers?
Answer: A unique Strong Health facility called the Center for Future Health. With this combination of world class expertise, we plan to slowly revolutionize health care in the home for seniors–and everyone else!
What makes this Center so extraordinary is the combination of medical professionals, technical experts, and social scientists working together for the same goal. That goal is user-friendly, unobtrusive, private, and affordable technology for improved health care at home.
How Does the Center for Future Health Operate?
By combining the intelligence of many different experts to tackle the tough problems facing seniors, we learn from each other. Then we put our new ideas to work in a living laboratory. We’ve actually built a “Smart Medical Home” for testing new technology right in the hospital. It’s a 5-room house with kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and living quarters. Observations, using real people living real lives, helps fast-track the results.
Current senior projects under study for health in the home include:
- Personal Medical Advisor System. How about having an expert to ask every time you’re unsure about medicine and issues related to your health? This device can interpret why you’re asking the question and quickly find the answers you seek, using microphones, text, and video displays throughout the house.
- Motion/Activity Monitoring. We’re studying an early warning system that will alert you to the possibility of a wide range of brain and body disorders including stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and arthritis. The system can also tell you if your fitness program is working effectively for you.
- Memory Assistance Aids. Smart memory technology will help you live in your own home despite moderate memory loss.
More Center Activities
We’re also looking at other ways to use private, portable, low cost, easy-to-use technology to improve health care at home, such as:
- Healthy skin. Imagine a smart mirror that identifies and tracks problematic changes in your skin, including early skin cancers.
- Pathogen detection. How about smart bandages that warn you if there’s an infection in your wound and detectors that tell you if there’s bacteria in your food.
- Health care for under served communities. Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic have the Little Intelligent Communities (LINCOS) projects using wireless technology and Internet access for health care services and education in wellness.