Emerge project

Emerge: Emergency Monitoring and Prevention
FP6-IST-2005-045056

Scope
The EMERGE project aims to support the activities of daily living of elderly people with an innovative monitoring system. With the use of ambient and unobtrusive sensors EMERGE plans to monitor activity, location and vital data of elderly people and detect deviations from typical behavior. The project engineers a prototype that treats emergencies with stepwise assistance. More specifically, the three steps involved are:

• To provide proactive assistance to the elderly people themselves and then integrate friends, family or caregivers, if necessary
• To contact the Emergency Medical Service (EMS), in case the emergency situation can not be resolved, and provide information about the medical situation of the affected person
• To resolve the situation through the involvement of EMS who provide medical care, telemedicine counseling or send a rescue team

The challenge –Targeted results
The ongoing demographical and social changes in European countries will result in a dramatic increase in the demand for EMS within the next years. Today, 44% of EMS resources are dedicated to patients over 70 years old. The scope of EMERGE is to address the inefficiencies of current EMS (late activations, false activations, lack of information, lack of preventative assistance, low user acceptance of current assistance devices, limited availability of solutions) and produce a more reliable system.

Project Objectives
1.Indetify and model most promising application scenarios for holistic emergency assistance.
2.Tranfer Emergency Model into an application design
3.Indentify and engineer suitable information technology
4.Engineer an adequate system architecture and platform
5.Validate the models and the engineered system in a laboratory and field tests

Target groups - Potential Users
The EMERGE project concerns elderly people with:
A high risk of falling
Depression
A high probability of having a stroke
High blood pressure
Diabetes

Expected results
The expectations are that the EMERGE project will offer a useful tool in dealing with emergency situations and that it will contribute to the prevention of health implications and the reduction in the number of deaths among the elderly population.

Pilot sites
The site where the project pilot will be implemented is the Alzheimer Center of the Psychogyriatric Company ¡O Nestor¢, Athens, Greece.

Technical approach
Identify the early indicators of the most critical emergency scenarios and the means to sense them.
Define the vital information that the project will provide the Emergency Medical Services with, in a case of emergency
Indicate suitable sensors that could be used for this purpose
Design a user-friendly prototype
Deploy the prototype into nursing homes and/or medical services facilities
Evaluate the feedback received from the use of the prototype
Update the project¢s website with the latest developments, produce leaflets, write papers and participate in conferences to promote the project
Organize prototype demonstrations to end users/general public

Other info
Visit the project’s web site at: http://www.emerge-project.eu/

The partners

• Fraunhof IESE-research and technology organization
• Siemens-electrical engineering and electronics company
• WKK-Westpfalz Klinikum GmbH-University hospital
• NCSR-National Research Center Demokritos
• E-Isotis
• Bay Zoltan Foundation for Applied Research (BZF)
• Art of technology (AOT)
• European Microsoft Innovation Center(EMIC)
• Medizinische Universitat Graz(MUG)

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