OCareClouds: improving home care by interconnecting elderly, care networks and their living environments

In order to reduce costs related to an aging population, health care will increasingly rely on in-home care as an alternative to admission in a medical facility. Even when hospitalization is necessary, it should be feasible to discharge elderly patients sooner and instead rely on in-home care that is on par with in-hospital care. Today however, there are many obstacles that remain open for delivering high-quality care at home. For one thing, environments to which discharged patients return are often not adapted to the patient's specific health care needs. For another, organizing in-home care with a large number of caregivers is often costly and cumbersome. Therefor, this paper presents OCareCloudS: a computer system that aims to improve in-home care by combining information pertaining to the care and the home environment of a patient with information relating to their network of caregivers. By means of a portable miniature home, this paper demonstrates how the interconnection of these three elements combined with ontology-based reasoning can improve the in-home health care in case of a patient with a physical disability.