Aware Group Home: Person-Centered Care as Creative Problem Solving

The population of elderly is rapidly increasing in Japan and we expect that almost eight percent of elderly people will suffer from dimentia in 2015. The change suggests that we can no longer hospitalize them, but have to find some way to go along with them at home. Group Home is thought to be ideal form of caregiving in the sense that the inhabitants can keep their contacts with the locals and circumstance to feel at home. Managing Group Home may, however, often run into troubles due to the cognitive asymmetry between the elderly with dementia and caregivers. We address in this paper the problems we found in the communication between the people with dementia and caregivers and present design principles for Aware Group Home, which enhances the awareness of caregivers towards people with dementia using information technologies.

Authors and Affiliations

1. School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Ishikawa, Japan

   Ryozo Takatsuka & Tsutomu Fujinami

Editors and Affiliations

1. School of Business, La Trobe University, 3086, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

   Rajiv Khosla

2. Centre for SMART systems Engineering Research Centre, University of Brighton, Moulsecoomb, BN2 4GJ, Brighton, UK

   Robert J. Howlett

3. School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Knowledge Based Intelligent Engineering Systems Centre, University of South Australia, 5095, Mawson Lakes, SA, Australia

   Lakhmi C. Jain

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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