Telecare can grow to meet demands of 2020

Telecare has the capacity to become a key tool in helping cope with future demands of the fast ageing population, once it gets past current restrictions.

Over the next 50 years, the population of over 65s will rise from 9.3m to 16.8m, with an estimated 90% of people wanting to live in their own home with any support they need made available to them.

By 2020, around 20.5m people are expected to suffer from long term conditions and the World Health Organisation predict it will become the ‘biggest killer’. The number of people requiring community based health and social care support to increase considerably.

Speaking at Laing and Buisson’s recent Telecare and Assistive Technology Conference, Dr Richard Curry, visiting industrial associate at the innovations studies centre at Imperial College, said that there were a number of trends and drivers that lead him to believe telecare will be a dominant force by 2020.

“As well as the increasingly ageing population and the increasing number of patients with long term conditions, government debate has fuelled customer expectations are rising and we are seeing a shift towards care in the wider community, patient empowerment and self care."

Dr Curry added these trends were coupled with a decrease in numbers of informal carers, and capacity limits in the system as costs continue to rise – "all of this points to telecare getting larger in the future".

“Patients will know by this time how the technology can help mitigate risks, whilst the patient remains at home, improves their own functionality and offers them prevention from any physiological, lifestyle or environmental problems they may encounter in their day-to-day life.”

Setting out his vision for telecare, Dr Curry described current technologies as small scale reactive products with limited integration abilities.

“Telecare at present is expanding. There is sufficient evidence which shows that it can progress. It started as a first generation product, providing a personal response without system intelligence and has grown to a second generation product able to automatically detect and generate alert calls. By 2020 I hope it will be more large scale, available to all who need it, be customised, integrated and be able to meet the third generation – the prediction of possible acute situations.”

Dr Curry believes that such technology could be near, with many of the products and technologies at the research stage in universities across the country. The next step is to identify development tasks such as systems integration, miniaturisation and product ionisation.

Demonstrating the benefits telecare could provide in the future, Dr Curry uses the Smith family as an example. There is a grandfather, who lives alone some distance away, takes Warfarin and has had a recent hip replacement, the family mother who is asthmatic, the father who suffers from bouts of depression and the teenage daughter who is overweight and bullied.

Dr Curry believes that predictive technology can help give this family the independence it wants, and away from hospital. Home hubs and communicators allow them to communicate with each other, and check everything is alright and home diagnostic centres will allow the family to log any illnesses they experience without having to go to a clinic.

There are also specific technologies. The grandfather can have a navigator, so that his movements can be checked to ensure he hasn’t fallen, and he can also have an INR measurement service to measure his blood for clots and even an implanted sensor.

The parents can work from home and use smart inhalers to deal with asthma problems and the daughter can use blogs to keep an online record of her feelings, which could be tracked by teachers and her parents, providing both the health and social care needs the patients have.

However, he warns that the industry must engage with users and deal with the limits to its growth.

“Technology should not replace face-to-face contact with carers. This must always be available as an option, and some applications may be too risky. There is also an issue that telecare must be the patient’s choice, it should not be forced upon them. Through partnership, dialogue and learning we can move forward. The future of telecare is all around; it is just poorly distributed.”