Prescribing tablets – Finland turns to technology to help frail old people live at home

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I N A GREY office building on the outskirts of Helsinki, a chatty social worker is meeting six elderly people from around town for lunch—via tablets propped on their kitchen tables.
The virtual lunch group is part of Helsinki’s remote-care programme for its elderly.
While many countries with bulging elderly populations are building new care homes, Finland is not planning to do so and, instead, is looking after people in their own homes for longer—even those with dementia who live alone.
Nurses and care workers drop in, often several times a day, to help with meals, bathing, medication, or just to check that everything is all right.
At a recent international health-tech fair in Helsinki many, if not most, of the offerings at the Finnish pavilion had to do with helping frail elderly people to live independently.
That involves two challenges: making sure that care workers know immediately when something goes wrong (an old person falls over, for example) and slowing the decline of elderly minds and bodies.
In Helsinki’s municipal home-care programme, about 4,000 frail people are equipped with various safety gadgets.
These include wristbands with GPS , a fall detector, an alarm button and a phone line linked to care workers, who monitor the wearer’s location on their computer screens.
Some people who have dementia have sensors on their front doors, which send alerts to the care team if they go out.
But if they venture out in the middle of the night or stray too far from home, care workers are dispatched to find them.
Technology cannot replace care workers, but it can help.
The most common reason for a home visit by a social worker in Helsinki is to check that Grandma is taking her medicine.
Care workers use dashboard summaries of such data to prioritise whom to visit and what to check for.
But even so, the share of contacts that home-care workers in Helsinki make virtually is not expected to rise much from its current 8% (out of 250,000 visits a month)

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