Impact Of Ict On Carers

484 Words2 Pages
Impact on carers As part of the changes in healthcare, informal carers (such as family members, elderly people) are taking on increasing responsibility for the delivery of care of all kinds. And ICTs have the potential to help carers with several of the challenges that they face. 1. Benefits ICT brought new devices called Personal and home-based equipment which includes sencor technologies, personal healthcare devices based on low-cost computer technology, which currently contains pendometers, thermometers, heart-rate monitors, blood-pressureand blood sugar monitors, body-fat analyser. All these devices allowed professionals and doctors to monitore people and patients within their everyday life effectively. Another good invention is the ‘Smart Homes’, which is used to control and provide communication with outside world. All these actions on monitoring of the elderly in relation to their mobility at different times of the day should allow more intelligent detection of falls. 2. Chalenges and the ways of solving them However, there are still a lot of chalenges and problems to be solved in order to get good results from the technologies described above. For example: some groups of people will be less able than others to use those technologies. They are: 1. Elderly people 2. Poor and socially deprived people 3. People who cannot read 4. The ‘IT illiterate’ (i.e. those without basic IT skills) 5. People with sensory deficits 1. Elderly people Researches have shown that many elderly people ‘take to’ IT as readily as younger age group. However, according to the survey taken for the Welsh Consumer Council, which showed that only 14% of over 65-year-old use the internet, we can say that many elderly people do not use IT. This problem is likely to be solved as technological development shifts usage from personal computers to mobile phones, but the main
Open Document