Rural-Health-Mate: A Tele-Monitoring System That Improves Rural Senior's Healthcare Via Monitoring, Communication And Stakeholder Interact

Although rural seniors (people 65 years and over) are living longer, they frequently require ongoing support from caregivers and medical professionals to make that possible. However, rural America has long been represented as having a unique set of obstacles and conditions that make the delivery of caregiving and medical services for seniors difficult.In this project, CreateAbility will conduct focus groups to clarify our understanding on the healthcare needs of rural seniors. We will then develop a prototype that will watch over them to keep them safe and reduce the need for trips to the nurses or doctors office, and then test this prototype with as many of the focus group members as possible.Beyond testing the utility of the prototype, CreateAbility hopes to understand how the availability of enhanced tele-medicine and tele-health devices could help improve the lives of rural seniors. Early results indicate that the demand for Rural-Health-Mate will be high among the target population who wishes to remain in their own homes, driven by their need for independence and: 1) their need to reduce the risk of falls, 2) low proximity to healthcare professionals, and 3) coordination of social, general caregiving, and health-related caregivers.