Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 10, numbers 1 and 2, 2018 // View article

Supporting Collaborative Care of Elderly through a Reward System based on Distributed Ledger Technologies

Authors:
Emilien Bai
Kåre Synnes

Keywords: Blockchain; Collaborative Care; Gamification

Abstract:
This paper discusses supporting collaborative care of elderly through a reward system based on distributed ledger technologies. The design and implementation of such a reward system that connect elderly and volunteers by mutual agreements involve technologies such as smart contracts and blockchains. The work is motivated by the demographic change, where an aging population consequently increases the need for care. This causes a great tension in our society, as care resources become increasingly constrained, both regarding costs and availability of care staff. Much of the daily care of the elderly is today done by family members (spouses, children) and friends, often on a voluntarily basis, which adds to the tension. The core idea of this work is to help broaden the involvement of people in caring for our elderly, enabled by a system for collaborative care. The proposed system benefits from recent advances in distributed ledger technologies, which similarly to digital currencies, are build on the ability for mutual agreements between people who do not know each other. The system also benefits from recent gamification techniques to motivate people to collaborate on a larger scale through performing simple daily tasks. The proposed system benefits from inherent distributed ledger technologies advantages, such as a high level of decentralization, thus a high availability, and strong data consistency. These advantages make it interesting to develop the possible links between blockchains and the outside world to allow for a higher level of automation and distribution of services such as collaborative care. New models for distributed ledger technologies, such as Iota tangles or the Swirld platform, may however scale and perform better than blockchains. These should thus be considered for a full implementation and test of the system. In summary, this paper presents a novel framework and prototype implementation of a reward system supporting collaborative care of elderly, that is based on distributed ledger technologies.

Pages: 90 to 102

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2018. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2018

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660