Abstract:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for home care systems was higher than ever before. Limited access to medical in-person care because of higher demand as well as quarantines and self-isolation could benefit from automating elements of the monitoring especially among the seniors and chronically ill people. A survey conducted before creating the eHealth system described in this paper showed that there were cases of healthcare workers reporting visits that never happened or that were too short to realize necessary tasks. During the system development, to optimize the system's efficiency and battery life, effects on the data transfer and collection intervals were measured and optimal settings were suggested. The system architecture was described in detail along with five applications being part of it and their purpose. Application dedicated for patients not only allows for monitoring with usage of smartwatches but also provide access to patient diary allowing to remind about the medications and log their intake well as serves for providing proof of the healthcare workers visits, and is used to call for help in case of emergency. To make healthcare workers visits accountable and an NFC-based algorithm was proposed to track both presence and the visit length. Several instances of the described system were deployed in Poland and are currently used to monitor hundreds of patients. also serves as a source of anonymized data about the patients to be used in future decision support systems.