A smart room for hospitalised elderly people: essay of modelling and first steps of an experiment.

We present a study of modelling and the first steps of an experiment of a smart room for hospitalised elderly people. The system aims at detecting falls and sicknesses, and implements four main functions: perception of patient and environment through sensors, reasoning from perceived events and patient clinical findings, action by way of alarm triggering and message passing to medical staff, and adaptation to various patient profiles, sensor layouts, house fixtures and architecture. It includes a physical multisensory device located in the patient's room, and a multi-agent system for fall detection and alarm triggering. This system encompasses a perception agent, and a reasoning agent. The latter has two complementary capacities implemented by sub-agents: deduction of type of alarm from incoming events, and knowledge induction from recorded events. The system has been tested with a few patients in real clinical situation, and the first experiment provides encouraging results which are described in a precise manner.

Psychological impact of a remote psychometric consultation with hospitalized elderly people.

Teleconsultation is a potentially useful approach to the psychological assessment of elderly patients. We assessed the psychological impact of a videolinked psychometric consultation in a sample of hospitalized elderly people. The 15 patients, none of whom had a psychiatric history, participated in a video-consultation and a conventional face-to-face consultation. The mean age of the patients was 88 years. Each consultation consisted of a preliminary interview with a psychologist and two psychometric tests which evaluated the patient's cognitive function (the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Clock Face Test). A second psychologist, who acted as an observer, assessed the patients' attitudes to the two types of consultation. Although most patients (11 of the 15) expressed a preference for the face-to-face consultation, the video-consultations were judged to be acceptable by the patients and the psychologists. The experience of teleconsultation could be improved by practice on the consultant's part and by some technical modifications. Finally, some differences in test scores were observed and further work is required to evaluate the reliability of different psychometric tests when used by videolink.

"Telepsychometry": a remote psychometry consultation in clinical gerontology: preliminary study.

OBJECTIVE: Evaluation of the clinical feasibility of remote psychometric consultation with elderly patients. METHODS: Remote consultation with six women and four men (average age 87) was compared with a standard consultation. An interview and two psychometric tests were used: the Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) and the Clock Face Test (CFT), which were administered by a clinical psychologist and controlled by a psychologist observer who remained in the room with the patient. The experimental setting consisted of two rooms linked by a coaxial cable. Each room was equipped with a camera, television screen, and microphone. The clinician was able to operate the mobile camera in the patient's room by remote control. The clinician was assisted by a computer, which helped to focus on standardized points. A video camera recorded the consultation for documentation purposes. RESULTS: Decreased performance was observed in the remote versus the standard consultation for both tests (MMSE: p = 0.008; CFT: p = 0.006). Physiologic hearing loss may have been responsible for a fall in the patients' attention. CONCLUSION: Remote psychometric consultation can be applied successfully to the psychological examination of elderly patients provided that communication problems are solved.