A functional framework of ambient iCare e-services for quality aging

Owing to the significant scale of the aging population and the cost involved, efforts for driving quality lifestyle of the elderly is crucial. Recently, eCare (electronic care) has been an important issue of health care that utilizes the Web technologies to improve the quality of health care. However, existing aging services (health care or eCare) are mostly oriented to clinical gerontology or neurophysiology of aging. Certain quality dimensions are disregarded such as community involvement, consumer participation and continuous quality improvement. This paper devises a novel notion called iCare (intelligent care) which extends eCare (electronic care) technologies to a domain of ambient e-services that meet the desired quality elements. The objective of iCare is to provide quality e-services to the elderly people anywhere and anytime. In other words, iCare is more oriented toward the behavioral and social angel of quality-aging e-services. We also present an iCare e-services framework that comprises an iCare e-service ontology and an e-service provision quality model. This framework functionally addresses what and how to unfold ambient iCare e-services. That is, the framework implies a future roadmap of quality-aging e-services that can be particularly accounted as affectionate technologies.