JCSE, vol. 2, no. 2, pp.180-199, 2008

DOI:

Linking Clinical Events in Elderly to In-home Monitoring Sensor Data: A Brief Review and a Pilot Study on Predicting Pulse Pressure

Mihail Popescu, Elena Florea
Health Management and Informatics Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA

Abstract: Technology has had a tremendous impact on our daily lives. Recently, technology and itsimpact on aging has become an expanding field of inquiry. A major reason for this interest isthat the use of technology can help older people who experience deteriorating health to liveindependently. In this paper we give a brief review of the in-home monitoring technologies forthe elderly. In the pilot study, we analyze the possibility of employing the data generated by acontinuous, unobtrusive nursing home monitoring system for predicting elevated (abnormal)pulse pressure (PP) in elderly (PP=systolic blood pressure-diastolic blood pressure). Oursensor data capture external information (behavioral) about the resident that is subsequentlyreflected in the predicted PP. By continuously predicting the possibility of elevated pulsepressure we may alert the nursing staff when some predefined threshold is exceeded. Thisapproach may provide additional blood pressure monitoring for the elderly persons susceptibleto blood pressure variations during the time between two nursing visits. We conducted aretrospective pilot study on two residents of the TigerPlace aging in place facility with age over70, that had blood pressure measured between 100 and 300 times during a period of two years.The pilot study suggested that abnormal pulse pressure can be reasonably well estimated (anarea under ROC curve of about 0.75) using apartment bed and motion sensors.

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