Technologies and Services for the Handicapped and Elderly
Improvements consist of reducing the length of stay in the medical instituion, improving decision-making through technically assisted functional assessment of disability, moving information to the patient instead of requiring the patient to move to the information, reducing the number of visits to primary care and hospital centres, raising the quality of delivered care, enabling the deliverer of care to manage patients more thoroughly and to manage more people. Many groups would benefit from such a strategy, including pregnant women, newborn and pediatric groups, adults-at-risk, the chronically-ill, and those with motor disability and age-related pathologies. Telecommunications have an obvious role to play in this process, in monitoring, measurement, instruction, and occasionally in treatment.