Mar 22, 2021
A GLOBAL healthcare technology specialist has set out its vision for a highly-personalised care model that would allow more older and vulnerable people to live independently for longer.
Tunstall is now on track to deliver a new intelligent care service called Cognitive Care – which uses
advanced AI to detect whether someone’s health could be about to deteriorate, spot a potentially undiagnosed condition, or to help them resolve an immediate social care need.
Taking data from multiple sources, including motion sensors, smartphones, wearables and recordings,it will provide a clear picture of the risks someone faces and ‘nudge’ them or their caregivers to respond, or alert a professional.
Cognitive Care is the next step in the evolution of Tunstall’s predictive care technology, which uses data from at-home monitoring devices to spot worrying changes in behaviour and suggest the most appropriate course of action.
It is designed to improve quality of life for more people, while reducing the number of GP visits, ambulance callouts, hospital admissions and demand for local authority-funded residential care.
Gordon Sutherland, chief executive of Tunstall, said: “Technology is widely seen as a way to address the challenges facing the health and social care sector due to an ageing population and the chronic health conditions associated with it. At-home monitoring systems, including alarms and telecare, have long been used to keep people safe, whether they are older or living with a disability or ill health. What we term the ‘care journey’ is now evolving rapidly beyond reactive calls for help and proactive steps such as reminding someone to make sure they get their flu jab.”
Explaining more, he added: “Predictive services allow us to see whether a person is at risk by using sensors in their home and applying rule-based AI decision-making. A sensor might detect someone is going to the toilet more frequently, or hadn’t opened the curtains that day, so the system would then suggest a visit to the doctor or prompt a call from a support worker. Cognitive Care goes a step further – it is an intelligent care model that identifies risk using data from different sensors, along with text and audio entries from a service user or their caregiver. Using advanced AI, the system can ‘nudge’ them to take action or alert their family or a professional that there might be an issue via a real-time messaging service.”
He said the technology was designed to build on the successes that telecare and remote monitoring have already delivered and empower people to take control of their health: “Many of us want to live independently for as long as possible, with the reassurance that we will be looked after well. We know from our research that proactive telecare helps 96% of users feel significantly safer, while 98% said it gave their family peace-of-mind. As we get closer to making Cognitive Care a reality, our goal is to give more people the freedom to live where they choose and also ensure much-needed medical and social care resources are channelled to the areas that need them most.”
Doncaster-based Tunstall has been at the forefront of technology for the health, housing and social care sectors for more than 60 years. With an estimated 5 million users worldwide, it works across Europe, Middle East and Australasia.
