Posts Tagged ‘Technology’
GANS online forum project receives funding from NS Dept of Seniors
GANS is pleased and excited to announce that our application to the Nova Scotia Department of Seniors Positive Aging Fund was successful!
The GANS proposal involves development of an online forum section to this website. We aim to create an online forum that is a discussion place fo
r Seniors in Nova Scotia, and anyone who works with or for them. To accomplish this, we are partnering with the Community Access Program (C@P).
C@P will help us deliver not only a useful and engaging online hub for discussions and information sharing, but will assist us in one of the key components to this: two tiers of learning for Seniors – how to use the forum, and how to teach other seniors to us it as well.
With much of Nova Scotia soon to have access to broadband internet service, we think this online forum can be a great way for Seniors to reach out to each other and create online communities for socializing and helping each other.
The GANS board will meet soon to work out the details of implementing this project – so watch this space!
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New technology helps older patients monitor condition at home.
An article in today’s Washington Post describes some innovative programs designed to help seniors or those with chronic conditions monitor themselves at home – reducing travel and time in hospital as well as costs.
Juanita Wood transmits her blood pressure readings to a clinic at her retirement community where she lives. Her husband, Arthur, seen in the mirror, uses a similar device, though he also keeps a written tally. Photo: Washington Post
“Every morning at 10 a.m. sharp, Juanita Wood, 87, taps “okay” on a screen to start up a device that takes her blood pressure and transmits the information to her medical clinic. At 10:30 a.m., her husband, Arthur, 91, touch-starts his own device, neatly lined up next to hers. The machine calculates his blood pressure and weight and sends them off, along with a blood sugar count that he enters by hand.
The Woods, of Catonsville, Md., are participants in one of several pilot projects that home health-care providers, retirement communities and others are conducting to see if high-tech but simple devices can help doctors closely monitor aging patients at home in a way that will help control problems before they escalate and cut back on the need for costly long-term care and hospital admissions — especially repeat hospital visits for chronic conditions.”
Programs such as these are not designed for diagnosis – there is not doctor remotely assessing you. Instead, they are designed to help elderly patients stay on top of their own medical condition, and be alert to changes that could indicate a more serious problem.
Read the full article here.
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Getting a needle from a haystack: one way to find news for and about seniors.
The internet is vast and the volume of information available to us is simply staggering. In the face of ever-growing resources for news on virtually any topic, how can we effectively filter this to find the news that is of interest to us? The key to surviving the information overload that is the internet is the use of clever tools designed to customize our searches or set parameters for what we are interested in.
One such tool is called Newsmap, which was designed by Marcos Weskamp. It creates a visualization of information from the Google News news aggregator. Google’s aggregator collects news from around the world. Newsmap takes the aggregated news stories and turns them into this:
Wow. I know what you are thinking: “Too much!” And it may be. But let me walk you through this and then show you how we can customize it to collect just the information we want.
The different colours correspond to the different news categories listed across the bottom right. Hover your mouse over any of the stories (on the website of course, not here) and a snippet from the story will pop up. Click your mouse on the story and it will open up in another window, at the website from which the story came. The creator explains the size of the cells:
“Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.”
The above image is all the news from Canada in all news categories.
Now let’s make this find just news from Canada about seniors, in the category of ‘health. We keep ‘Canada’ selected at the top, type in ‘seniors’ in the search bar on the top right, and de-select all the categories at the bottom except for health. ‘ What we get looks like this:
This is a very handy tool for a group like us who run a blog that needs fresh content updated every day or two, but it’s also fun for anyone who would like to try it. We can customize the search to look for a variety of topicssee quickly what topics are hottest in the news right now.
To try this yourself, head over to Newsmap and give it a whirl. Remember, you can’t break it, so just enter something in the search bar and see what happens. Happy hunting!
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