Active Life Coach: Towards a Framework for Holistic Care of Citizens as They Age

The continuous demographic change, recorded in recent EU and USA reports, clearly indicates that there will be a growing mass of senior citizens who will enjoy good health and will be able to play an active part in the modern workforce and the society. Undoubtedly this requires a more active and healthier status so that the risk of health and wellbeing problems, including cognitive decline is minimized. A combination of different factors such as proactive lifestyle changes, physical and cognitive exercise, and social interaction may play an important role for achieving the aforementioned goal; however, compiling a holistic masterplan that sets specific measurable objectives for achieving these factors requires not only the senior citizen’s active engagement but also the collaboration of a diverse set of healthcare specialists as well as the support of the citizen’s family and close friends. Furthermore, the coordination of this diverse group of people, the real-time monitoring of the masterplan ensuring to the best possible extent that the objectives are met, the continuous adaptation of the objectives in case some or all the objectives are not met, present significant challenges. This paper introduces the Active Life Coach, a framework that paves the way for holistic care of senior citizens in order to allow them to maintain their independent living, health status and functional effectiveness as well as preserve their physical, cognitive, mental and social well-being. Through a thorough investigation of literature and state-of-the-art health care frameworks in different domain areas, we identify critical functional requirements that should be realized by our framework. We then describe the architectural design of Active Life Coach, justifying its design choices by taking into account the requirements drawn from the investigation.