Smart-room project opens doors for seniors

OTTAWA — At 73 and living alone, Beverley Montgomery depends on friends and neighbours to look in on her from time to time to make sure she is fine.

Like most seniors, Montgomery doesn’t want to live in a nursing or long-term care home, but as she ages, living alone becomes increasingly challenging. She could be in serious trouble and no one would notice for days. She has no children.

Because of the growing number of Beverley Montgomerys out there as Ottawa gets older, health officials are looking to new ways to help them stay independent — such as “smart apartments,” places where they can live and be gently monitored around the clock. Scientists and physicians say it is the way of the future, and it is all about saving lives. If health costs go down, it will be a bonus, they say.

One day this week, Montgomery sampled a prototype smart apartment that has been in operation at Elisabeth Bruyère Continuing Care for about five years. In the one-bedroom apartment with a living area and kitchen, everything from the bed, couch, fridge and bathroom, are wired and fitted with hidden sensors that track everything from sleeping and breathing patterns of the resident to their muscle strength, and whether the fridge door is open or closed.

Motion sensors in fibre-optic mats under the bed showed Montgomery lying on the bed, and recorded her arm strength as she sat on the edge of the bed to get up. Simulating night conditions, sensors in the bedroom lit up a path to the bathroom so she doesn’t trip on an object and fall. Sensors in the bathroom acknowledged her entry and departure and once she was back in bed, the lights slowly went off. There are no cameras and no pictures are taken. What’s recorded are data images from which doctors can deduce if something is wrong. Montgomery came away impressed.

“I live alone in a townhouse with stairs and I take care of myself. But it gets harder every day,” she says. “Because I live alone and have no children, an apartment like this will be wonderful. You will not be alone.”

Indeed. It is precisely what the smart-room project, known by the acronym TAFETA (“Technology Assisted Friendly Environment for the Third Age”) is meant to do.

Being undertaken jointly by Elisabeth Bruyère and Carleton University’s faculty of engineering and design, the TAFETA apartments will allow seniors to live independently and safely at home.

The technology might also be used in nursing homes to help monitor sicker residents.

Professor Rafik Goubran, Carleton’s dean of engineering and design, says the idea of a smart apartment is to use technology to improve health care by keeping a constant eye on a vulnerable segment of the population. While it has the feel of Big Brother watching, he says it is really not.

“The beauty of smart-room technology is that it is unobtrusive. You don’t see it, but it is there to make sure you are safe,” says Goubran, co-chair of the project.

Dr. Frank Knoefel is vice-president of medical affairs at Elisabeth Bruyère, which includes Saint Vincent and Elisabeth Bruyère hospitals, as well as two long-term-care homes.

He is also co-chairman of the project and says smart-room technology is indispensable for the future because of aging baby boomers who will want to spend their twilight years at home.

According to city projections, the number of people aged 65 or more will increase by 50 per cent over the next 20 years, and will continue rising with far-reaching consequences. Caring for them will not be easy.

“The biggest challenge with baby boomers is that they are not going to expect to be institutionalized. They are going to expect to age at home and we have to prepare for that,” Knoefel says.

Smart rooms will be a big part of the solution, he says.

Doctors say the major problems facing the elderly include memory lapses, limited mobility, loose bladders, strokes, diabetes and heart disease.

The technology being developed in Carleton University engineering labs and tested at Elisabeth Bruyère is designed to help many of these seniors cope better. They include medicine bottles that send signals when they are opened, grab bars that can tell the weight of the person who holds them, a gadget called an electronic nose that captures odours such as rotten foods, and fibre-optic pressure mats embedded in floors to monitor mobility.

The main monitoring tool is the mats. Placed under a mattress, floor or couch, they capture vital patient information 24 hours a day in a way that doctors and nurses cannot. As well, a son or daughter travelling abroad, for example, can always keep an eye on a parent through the Internet.

A dozen mats have been deployed in 10 rooms at Elisabeth Bruyère for trials on different patients and a number of them are being tried in a seniors’ housing unit in the westend — all with promising results. Knoefel hopes that in five years, some of the products will be ready for commercial use.

He says the key thing about smart rooms is that they allow doctors and other caregivers can catch problems very early on.

Doctors can tell from tracking information whether someone’s breathing pattern is normal or symptomatic of the onset of something as serious as stroke.

They can also detect from motion sensors whether someone’s movement is normal or something that should raise an alarm. They can use the information to change treatment.

In essence, physicians, nurses and caregivers can build a health profile of a person so that when there is a serious deviation, they will know immediately what to do.

The information can be accessed easily by computer by different people, making it less likely that a problem will be missed.

“We can intercept things right off the bat and doctors can deal with them before they grow into big problems,” Knoefel says.

He says smart rooms offer more than clinical benefits. He says round-the-clock monitoring can help reduce injuries and fatalities that accompany falls by seniors.

Knoefel says many seniors lie on the floor in pain for days after a fall because people just don’t know about it.

But smart-room technology can change that.

He says if someone goes to the bathroom for instance, and after say, half an hour, a sensor shows the person not in the bathroom, but also not back in bed or sitting on the couch, alarm bells would go off and immediate action would be taken to ascertain if the person is in some kind of trouble.

“We know that in the 82-years-and-older group, half of the people that break their hips don’t survive the year. In a smart apartment, it doesn’t take three or four days before somebody shows up when it is too late,” Knoefel says.

“Or if you are a diabetic, your blood sugar is bad and you have a routine that shows you get up at 8 o’clock in the morning but it is 9 o’clock and you are still in bed, you may be in trouble.

“You might want someone to check on you and in a smart apartment, a nurse or daughter that’s keeping an eye on you might do that and save your life.”