-Believes China Will Realize Intelligent Care and Nursing for Senior Citizens in the Future
CHENGDU, China, Sept. 17, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Upon invitation, Magicare, an excellent enterprise of Chengdu Tianfu Software Park, will show the world the intellectualization and big data application of aged care at the Smart City Brains section of the 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference on September 17. Magicare is the only intelligent aged care enterprise invited to the conference. Its insights into and analysis of the “internet plus health care” field has represented the latest exploration and development of China’s aged care industry under the technological impact.
The CEO He Wei (on the left) and CTO Li Guangpeng of “Internet plus Aged care” start-up enterprise Magicare
In the context of the increasingly severe trend of population aging, the concept of “intelligent old-age care” emerged at the right moment for the purpose of improving and guaranteeing the life qualities of aged people. As a start-up enterprise of “internet plus aged care”, Chengdu Magicare Technology Co., LTD. has been incubated successfully in Chengdu Tianfu Software Park and has taken the lead in the industry. As Magicare’s CEO He Wei said, its intelligent aged care and nursing system which was developed and researched independently has had group customers of 60 corporations. With the market share ranking number one in China, the system has been implemented in 30 cities. Magicare is the first enterprise of China to possess intelligent aged care and nursing products and also the first to export such technologies to Finland and Japan.
Status quo: a shortage of nursing resources
As the data showed, the number of aged people in China has reached as many as 211 million in 2014, including 200 million having home-based care, 8 million having community support and 3 million having institution care. Until 2020, the number of aged people will keep rising continuously, while the number of the aged who will need community support for elderly life will rise to 17.01 million, and the number of aged people needing institutional care will reach 7.29 million.
“Now, the shortage of nursing resources has been a tremendous difficulty in the aged care industry,” He Wei, Magicare’s CEO said. China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs has issued statistics that the shortage of aged care and nursing workers was about more than 12 million. Wei continued: “The proportion of nursing attendants in the nursing institutions for the aged is between 1 to 15 and 1 to 20. That is to say, one attendant needs to take care of 15-20 aged people, while the nursing attendant proportion in Japan is 1 to 3 and that in Hong Kong is 1 to 4.” To change this situation, many universities in China have gradually established the aged care and nursing major to cultivate human resources. “However, in the long cultivation period, we must think about how to define ‘China’s age-people caring mode’ and how to solve all kinds of difficulties in aged care,” said Wei.
Thought: a coverage of three aged care modes
Some scholars raised the concept of “9073” for the current situations of old-age care in China, which means 90% of the aged people spend their old age at home, 7% in the communities and 3% in the nursing institutions for the aged. However, through the profound investigations for the aged care industry in these several years, He Wei raised a different view: “The aged people would choose to live their old age at home when their bodies are in a relatively healthy state, and they would choose community care when they become older. They will choose professional institution to spend their old age when their health condition is really poor. These three modes are mutually complementary and indispensible.” He Wei plans to provide services and solve problems with scientific and technological methods, taking aged people care institutions as the starting step, community care for the aged people as the second step and home-based care for the aged people as the last step.
To collect data from the front-line old age caring institutions, the programmers of “Magicare” moved into the old age caring institutions, lived and ate together with the aged people. With eight months’ in-depth life there, the technologists designed a whole set of software and hardware products according to the most practical and demanding needs of the elderly people. To convert the design into products, He Wei had no experience to learn from. On the upstream, the parts-makers had no data. On the downstream, the foundry didn’t have an assembly method, a production technique, nor was it clear about the quality test standards. The first order of Magicare only included ten bracelets. “With continuous hardships and repetitive experiments for two years, we finally launched the first set of commercial products,” said Wei. In the entrepreneurial process, He Wei has met with more than one hundred investors. Continuous negations and doubts haven’t changed his determination of showing his respect to the old age caring cause: “We have also got many supports in this career. Tianfu Software Park has provided us offices free for three years, which has been a very great help for we frugal enterprise starters.”
Now, Magicare has already accomplished the exploration for intelligent care and nursing of institutional aged care. As for community and home-based aged care, He Wei put forward his view: home-based aged care must depend on community. The internet is not accessible to the majority of aged people, and thus it can only reach them through community offline service stores.” On learning from the experience of internet S2C thought, Magicare began to integrate resource S terminal to provide energies for the C terminal and expanded the exploration of the commercial route of community aged care. They have launched a new product “smart Magicare” in communities. The S terminal is a powerful supply chain platform, the B terminal refers to community day-care center, and the C terminal refers to aged people in the community. “Constructing a supply chain platform to connect the day-care center with the aged people in the community, and this method solves the problems happening in the last area between the communities’ aged-people care and home-base aged care,” said Wei.
At present, “smart Magicare” has seen 136 seed stores and 226 co-construction users. In the future, aged people can enjoy day care, full-time care, meal delivery, cleaning, physical therapy, door-to-door services within 1.5 kilometers and other services in the community stores of the “smart Magicare”.
Products: aged-people oriented design
Magicare has launched systematic scientific solutions for institutional aged care. The solutions include five functions: call service, active forewarning, care and nursing plan, health record and interaction with children. Li Guangpeng, CTO of Magicare, has shown the specific operation mode of the intelligent care and nursing system.
In the call service, aged people can use bracelets, breast plates and bedside alarms to realize “one-button alarm”. “According to the different needs of the aged people, we have designed the call modes for different scenes. Old people who are in good physical condition can wear the bracelet and press the alarm button when in an emergency; if aged people have difficulties in moving, and can’t press down the button of the bracelet, such as the old people with Parkinson’s disease, we have designed relatively bigger breast plate which can make calls as long as the aged people lower their heads,” said Li Guangpeng. Li Guangpeng pressed down the bracelet on the spot, and the electronic display screen of the medical nursing terminal immediately displayed the information and accurate position of the person who had made the call. “Through repetitive data operations, we have endeavored to control the positioning precision of the calling within 5 meters outdoors and 2 meters indoors. Moreover, the medical nursing personnel will wear the bracelets so that they can receive the calling information of the aged people at all times and places.”
To display the active forewarning function more vividly, Magicare has simulated the home-based life scenes of the aged people. “We will install smoke alarms and activity detectors for aged people’s activities. If aged people don’t have any activities in the room for a long time, the system will make alarms automatically,” said Li Guanpeng. Moreover, Li Guangpeng has also displayed another monitoring “Black Technology” — an intelligent mattress which can not only monitor the heart rate, breath, and body actions, but also can actively alert the medical nursing personnel if the aged person has left the bed.
Along with the painstaking work for the above-mentioned hardware facilities, the software development of Magicare followed closely. When aged people enter the aged care institutions, a suitable customized care and nursing plan will be generated automatically. When the medical nursing personnel make the daily physical examination for the aged people, the data of the results will be uploaded in real time to the Cloud to form health reports. “The medical nursing personnel don’t need to write and copy the health reports by hand. Our goal is to free the hands of them, for they should work on more efficient tasks,” Li Guangpeng said. At last, children can browse the physical condition of the aged people and interact with them through the WeChat of Magicare.
