Elderly and homecare tasks: A literature review on problems

Personalization of IT-based homecare services is one of the essential requirements for their successful introduction. A service tailoring process assist a person responsible for deciding on the care activities (the ‘care-giver’) to create a personalized composite service for an elderly (the ‘care-receiver’) based on the care-givers professional knowledge and with minimal assumptions on their technical knowledge and skills. The outcome of the service tailoring process is called a service plan, which represents a composite service tailored to the specific needs of a care-receiver. Designing such a service plan from scratch is a difficult and time consuming task. The use of patterns can simplify the process of creating a service plan. A service plan pattern, as a starting point for the tailoring process, is a treatment pattern which is an activity structure for handling a generic homecare task. To define the treatment patterns the understanding of problems related to such homecare tasks is necessary. This paper, by means of a literature survey, studies characteristics of common problems faced by elderly and current existing solutions for these problems. We believe that identifying such problems helps IT experts to develop a better understanding of requirements and to define correct and complete treatment patterns.