CoME - Caregivers and ME

Venha (AAL-2014-127) é um projecto europeu para a promoção da saúde em idosos

CoME (AAL-2014-127) is a European Project approved in the AAL Call 2014 Care for the Future.

The CoME project aims to facilitate the self-management of seniors, encouraging them to have a healthier lifestyle and helping them in the prevention/detection of MCI risks. To reach these aims, the application operates through: the establishment of personalized health goals for seniors, the use of wearable devices for continuous monitoring of their ADLs, the performance of self-assessment tests and the participation in brain games.

Results from above actions are periodically supervised by formal caregivers. They track and check these results and provide reports and recommendations to seniors in order to act upon the behavioural risks that influence the development of MCI, slowing down in this way the appearance of the disease.

Although the service mainly focuses on seniors, it also addresses other actors involved in the care process:

- Informal caregivers. CoME enables informal caregivers to know better current senior’s health status (if allowed by the senior). In addition, the CoME platform provides a comprehensive and centralized online community of caregivers. Throughout this community, informal caregivers can access useful guidelines on good practice and tutorials as well as share experiences through AR devices. Finally, this platform allows informal caregivers to contact each other for occasional care tasks through a match-making search engine.

- Formal/Professional caregivers. The platform will provide them with a continuous flow of up-to-date information related to the senior’s health status. After processing this information, the formal caregivers will provide health reports where activities to promote healthier lifestyle and slow down MCI will be gathered.

Being MCI prevention and detection the focus of the project, it was clear that the main target group for CoME should be people not yet diagnosed with MCI. However, this is not totally true because of the connection with MyGuardian. In fact MyGuardian project was focused on MCI people management, being MCI people its target group.

Thus, the union of both of them makes CoME able to complete the circle around MCI disease, i.e. from the initial stage, prevention and detection, to management of the disease. Thus, the project will have as main target group: healthy seniors, seniors not diagnosed yet with MCI and seniors already diagnosed.