Health-enabling technologies for the elderly - An overview of services based on a literature review

Background: Services for the elderly based on health-enabling technologies promise to contribute significantly to the efficiency and effectiveness of future health care. Due to this promise, over the last years the scientific community has designed a complex variety of these valuable innovations. A systematic overview of the developed services would help to better understand their opportunities and limitations. Objective: To obtain a systematic overview of services for the elderly based on health-enabling technologies and to identify archetypical service categories. Methods: We conducted a literature review using PubMed and retrieved 1447 publications. We stepwise reduced this list to 27 key publications that describe typical service archetypes. Results: We present six archetypical service categories, namely handling adverse conditions, assessing state of health, consultation and education, motivation and feedback, service ordering and social inclusion and describe their implementation in current research projects. (c) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.