Today, evaluations of the health of older people and people receiving treatment in their home are normally based on checked boxes on a form. The same is true for on-line students who rarely or never visit their campus. At Umeå University, a current project is trying to change this.
“It is all about making life easier for these people” says Adi Anani who is in charge of the project.
Lately, it has become more and more common for both patients and older people, who for different reasons need surveillance, to be treated in their home. It can be a positive experience in many ways; they are free to move around as they please without being tied to different instruments or unfamiliar environments. At the same time, it makes it harder for the doctors and therapists to estimate the value of different health parameters. E-health is term referring to an electronic control of health.
Adi Anani, university lecturer and the driving force behind the project, explains that there is a number of important parameters to take into consideration when estimating a person’s e-health.
“There’s always the emotional expressions you can read in a person’s face, such as whether they are happy, angry, frustrated and so forth”, he says, “but you can also look at the movement pattern, how a person walks and moves around, to see how he or she is feeling and find warning signs.”
Anani says that, except for a camera, there are plans on also connecting physical signals like ECG to the system, all in order to get a more detailed perception of the health and identify situations that have an either stressing or relaxing effect on the person at hand.
When it comes to on line students, Anani says they want to be able to measure both the overall health and the ability to concentrate as well as study techniques.
“With the camera we can see how different students act in the learning process” he explains, “who can sit focused in from of the computer for a long time and who moves around a lot.”
On line students are a group whose health have never previously been researched. Therefore, there is an interest to see whether this form of education affect the health conditions in any way.
Adi Anani is well aware it may seem uncomfortable to be constantly supervised by a camera in your own home, but stresses the fact that the project has these people’s best interest in mind.
“The idea is for these measurements not to feel like an inconvenience” he says, “on the contrary, what we want to do is improve peoples’ living conditions.”
There is yet another part of the project, dealing with children’s ability to read.
“In that case we are creating a pattern for the eye movements, that is where you look and how the eyes move over the text” Anani explains.
For children with reading and writing disorders it is important to get a correct diagnose early on. Using these simple methods for measuring reading patterns you can get information about the problems based on how the eyes move when trying to interpret a text.
So far, the work with the different measuring methods is being done in a laboratory environment, but Anani says the plan is to start working with test persons as soon as they have more knowledge about the different functions. He says there is great competence in the project and has a very positive outlook on the future.
CMTF, c/o Tillämpad fysik och elektronik
Umeå universitet, 901 87 Umeå
Tel: +46 (0)90-786 96 38.
E-post: Britt Andersson.
