Telecare Aware has moved – see below

And while you are shopping for an emergency alerting device, why not pick up a stun gun or taser, too? Read more.

Interesting development that uses ultrasound sensors rather than radio devices to track patients around a hospital. Read more.

And patient and equipment tracking using wide-band RFID tags. Online article.

Falls often happen soon after an older person has got out of bed or stood up from a chair because of a drop in blood pressure. “When we stand up, a certain head of pressure is required to supply the brain with blood. If this system is impaired in an old person, the blood doesn’t get there fast enough.” Read from Times Online.

Thousands of people in care homes are being given the wrong medicine, someone else’s medicine or doses that are dangerous. Commission for Social Care Inspection report.

Age Concern England and BT announce a three year partnership worth £240,000. This will help to transform Age Concern’s 150 nationwide computer ‘drop ins’ and access points into a cohesive network of ‘Silver Surfer Clubs’.

BT will also be co-sponsoring a week-long event in May with Intel and Microsoft with the aim of promoting the opportunities that computers and the internet can provide for older people and encouraging them to learn new technology skills.

Click to read the full article.

The heavily trailed Government White Paper ‘Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services’ was published on the DH website this afternoon. It has been flagged in the media as being about improving patient choice (what a surprise!) and moving hospital services out into the community. (They still don’t get it do they?) We will read and comment in due course…

In the meantime, we can let you know that ‘telecare’ gets six mentions (four of which are confined to the Glossary); ‘telehealth’ and ‘ehealth’ have no mentions, and ‘telemedicine’ and the US TELeHEART project have one mention each. ‘Assistive technology’ appears five times, two of which clearly conflate it with ‘telecare’. Furthermore, they can’t even get the name of their grant right.

Link to DH site

For some real user choice, look no further than the ‘Self Assessment’ navigation just added to the Disabled Living Foundation’s website. The Self Assessment Rapid Access (SARA) programme allows users or carers to work through an assessment for equipment and provides a tailored report. Now available on the web, for the first time. SARA was initially developed and piloted with Department of Health funding and The Disabled Living Foundation is seeking organisations that can help fund further developments.

Register and try it out

‘A row over who would provide Careline erupted after Freebridge refused to take over the service from the council, saying it wasn’t part of the transfer deal and a “financial risk” as the customer base could not be guaranteed.’ Local news report

Care ‘threatened’ by council cuts. BBC report

Councils may cut services to keep down council tax. Guardian report

This wildly provocative title leads to an interesting discussion at the INTERACT 2005 conference, in Rome last year on ‘Home Monitoring and Control for Older People’ and this contribution by Andrew Monk from the Centre for Usable Technology (CUHTec), York University. The crunch question being ‘will I instruct my children to let an activity monitor make suggestions about my care needs, in the event that I become “a little vague”?’

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