ICT Technologies and Their Application to the Home Environment in Asian/Oceania Regions : From the View Points of Aging and Home Healthcare

Abstract

Almost all countries/regions in the world are now facing the dominant issue of the aging society. In order to observe what happened in the Asian region in terms of change of human resources, we numerically analyze numerical data collected by the author to elucidate the trends and relationships present in ICT migration and expenditure on health. The analysis of the statistical trends in such items in recent years for the Asian/Oceania region (11 countries) leads to several observations. Changes in estimate Total Expenditure on Health (eTEH) as related to the % rate of elderly people and age dependence of cost on health are estimated using simple expenditure on health (EH) per capita model proposed herein. Numerical evaluations show that even with the constant rate of population, the 65+ increase yields the large increase in eTEH. Therefore, decreasing additional expenditure for 65+ and improving the health of younger people as well are needed to keep TEH constant or to increase it as smaller amount as possible. Relative increase in eTEH for 14 countries (11 Asian/Oceania and 3 others) for 2020 and 2050 are extrapolated from the values collected. Recent research activities conducted in the Information Networking Laboratory of Seikei University, that focus on the vital issue of information transfer enabling to reduce the expenditure especially for elderly, are also introduced together with some detail on foot pressure sensing and thermal information capturing projects.