Traditional methods of diagnosis fail to demonstrate the transition from being healthy, energetic, and independent to being sick and frail for elderly persons. Approaches that will provide objective and continuous assessments of an individual’s function that can be applied to community dwelling persons are needed. Continuous monitoring of health status of the community dwelling elders may effectively prevent potential social psychological and medical crises by automatically triggering an appropriate and timely response from health care systems.  The continuous monitoring system might have large potential economic implications to contain the increasing cost of providing health care services to the aged.

     Remote monitoring has been found to be a very cost-effect way of monitoring the health conditions of the elderly as well as identifying high-risk groups within the community. The purpose of this group project is to establish a remote monitoring system for community dwelling elders.  In this group project, instruments for assessing different aspects of well-being of elders will be finalized, predictors for excessive medical care resources utilization will be identified, monitoring protocols will be developed, a client registration system and remote monitoring devices will be established. In this group project, we will also develop theoretical models integrating laboratory and social/behavior sciences to explain the medical resources utilization, including the number of hospitalizations, emergency room visits, out-patient clinic visits, nursing home and home nursing utilization, of community dwelling elders in Taiwan. At the same time, a cohort database of community dwelling elders can then be established. By doing so, not only the incidence of diseases can be followed, this database can also served as a control for many clinical studies.

     Based on Lawton’s model, physical competence, psychological well-being, quality of life, and environment comprise of “the good life” of elderly persons. A prospective, descriptive, co relational design will be used to explore the research question. After the pilot study has been conducted in the first 6 months, 300 randomly selected elderly persons from the community will be followed longitudinally every 6 months for the next two years. Variables measured in this project are psychological and physical well-being, quality of life, housing quality, and medical resources utilization. In addition, qualitative data for instrument development and modification will be collected. Structural equation modeling will be used to analyze the data. With the perspective of the whole project group, this study can provide a more holistic understanding of will-being on the medical resources utilization of the elders within the community. The remote monitoring system will be established.