ABILITY - Telerehabilitation

Subject: Social Innovation (Aging society; home automation)

Dementia, one of the main causes of disability among the elderly and the main reason older people require care, is a priority that public health needs to address. There are no available drugs to treat the condition or to stop it from becoming more severe. People with dementia rely mainly on their carers.

The proposal of TelerehABILITation: Integrated platform enabling the remote delivery and control of physical and cognitive rehabilitation and self management aims at creating a Personal Smart Health Community for the management, monitoring and supply of interactive motor-cognitive rehabilitation exercises for people suffering from dementia in their favourite "setting" (their home), according to the paradigm of citizens as co-producers of health. The system will allow clinicians to constantly check the effectiveness of the activities, to change them if necessary and to maintain - even at a distance - a constant relationship with the patient and carer.

The Personal Smart Health Community will be characterised by an open, inter-operational and customised “context aware” platform. The platform will be the operative system in which the information collected from various sources (such as the IT systems of the NHS, medical and non-medical sensors, multimedia contents and experiences, intelligent devices) will be set in context, according to the Internet of Things paradigm. Innovative therapy modules and assistance services will be identified, defined and customised according to the profile and risk level. They can be tailored to the patient's actual behaviour, in order to perform an "integrated" and "unique" control, assessment and validation of the rehabilitation therapy.

The prototypes and services that have been developed, tested, validated and qualified according to the "living lab" model, with the active involvement of centres of excellence of neuro-rehabilitation (IRCSS S. Maria Nascente della Fondazione Don Gnocchi and Villa Beretta) and the involved PAs, represent an innovation factor and considerable discontinuity in the appropriate and effective treatment of neuro-rehabilitation therapy.