| Abstract | An ever-increasing aging population presents a healthcare challenge to governments worldwide. In Thailand, senior citizens aged 60 years or older currently account for more than 10% of the population, thereby highlighting the importance of elderly caregiving. Unlike in western societies, elderly caregiving in Thailand is almost always the responsibility of family members (informal caregivers). A majority of Thai informal caregivers however lack proper elderly caregiving knowledge and skills. Moreover, the demanding nature of elderly caregiving puts enormous emotional strain on the caregivers. The goal of this research then is to support informal caregivers to the elderly, particularly in Thailand, by developing an online system which analyzes and attends to their needs on a continuous basis. In the process, we address certain functionality and performance constraints inherent in existing online support systems. The proposed online elderly care support system utilizes case-based reasoning methodology to generate individualized elderly
care recommendations. In addition, users are allowed to create individualized daily care
plans, which proves to be useful for inexperienced informal caregivers. Comparison tests, in
fact, indicate that our system is more feature-comprehensive and user-friendly. Our support
system as implemented consists of six modules: profile management, case-based reasoning elderly care recommender, social interaction, information resources, rule-based reasoning
daily care plan, and notification modules.
The support system was implemented on a trial basis with a sample of Thai informal
caregivers for a period of three months. Prior to mplementation an assessment was carried
out on attributes ranging from caregiving efficiency to the caregiver’s psychological state.
A post-implementation assessment was subsequently undertaken and a etermination made of our system’s impact.
The research findings revealed that the proposed online support system significantly
improved caregiving knowledge and skills of the caregivers while significantly lowering the
psychological distress levels. Moreover, post-implementation users’ satisfaction with the
support system was high. |