Emergency monitoring and prevention - EU Project EMERGE

As a consequence of the demographic and societal changes, there is rising involvement of emergency medical services and emergency physicians in geriatric emergencies. Elderly people living in single households are especially endangered by the late detection of acute emergencies and the resulting negative impact on the individual. The EU-funded project EMERGE aims to utilize ambient intelligence technologies for detecting acute emergency situations in elderly people's homes and for alerting emergency response personnel early in case of a deterioration of the elderly person's health status, based on a combination of ambient, unobtrusive sensor technologies, software abstractions and expert systems for situation recognition and decision support. Using an integral generic medical model, the user behavior is analyzed on the basis of the monitored activities of daily living on user mobility and on selected vital parameters. The timely provision of information thus obtained and close integration into coordinating social services (e.g., emergency dispatch centers) provides assistance for scheduling appropriate medical support and helps on-site medical staff.