CASSIA

The CASSIA project – Cloud Assisted per la Salute e Sicurezza dell’Anziano – develops and verifies an assistance service for home monitoring in an operating environment. The focus is the observation of activities and possible falls on three families of users: elderly people with a slight cognitive decline, elderly people with particular pathologies, or Parkinson’s (neurological disorder causing anomalies on the subject’s gait) and outcomes from TIA (transitory ischemic attack, alarm bell that may precede stroke). The system allows these people, fragile and at risk, to continue to live in their home safely and with remote support. The service responds to the institutions’ need to align themselves with the regional guidelines (LR 22/2014 “Promotion of Active Aging”, which sets objectives such as the stay at home of the elderly person, support for home assistance and the dissemination of correct lifestyles, etc.). In particular, the possibility of observing the activities is certainly a help to avoid or rescue promptly in the event of a fall of the monitored patient. In fact, this event is generally one of the first causes of access to the Emergency Room (about 1,800,000 cases / year over 65, and the first cause of traumas and fractures, whose direct cost is about € 13,000 per fall, and is one of the first items of expenditure of the sanitary system), and it is an event with nefarious outcomes for the elderly / frail subjects.
CASSIA wants to act precisely in the field of home security, detecting activities, movements and falls, thanks to the activation of preventive interventions and a remote assistance service that is activated by the alert – output of the analysis of the data relating to environmental sensors and wearable – through specific artificial intelligence algorithms that make up the DSS (Decision Support System) system. CASSIA is therefore able to give an effective and integrated response in the care system both to the private market represented by the elderly and their families, and to the public in terms of support for domiciliary (to encourage a more autonomous aging, to the benefit of maintenance of an active life and less recourse to the Services or even to the institutionalization, sometimes premature and choice in the absence of alternatives). It fits perfectly into the regional and national policies aimed at favoring territorial assistance, optimizing the connection between the hospital and the territory and favoring the social component in the pathways of care and reacquisition of the autonomy and self-determination of fragile people. The same system can be read and used as a tool for the temporal verification of the motor performance of the patients, favoring the doctor in controlling the course of the disease, also caused by changes in the pharmacological treatment. In the literature there are several solutions experimented for the detection of falls, as well as for the detection of movement for particular pathologies: however, integrated solutions of intelligent devices (made by suitable algorithms) associated with structured social-health assistance services are not identified. This integration means emotional and psychological security for the citizen and his family network.