Optimizing Assistive Technologies for Aging Populations

Demographics reveal that the proportion of elderly individuals in the population is growing at a significant rate. Advances in medicine have allowed populations to live longer than ever; however, ensuring that these individuals have the tools necessary to sustain a productive and happy lifestyle as they age remains a concern. Optimizing Assistive Technologies for Aging Populations focuses on the development and improvement of devices intended to assist elderly individuals in coping with various physical limitations and disabilities. Highlighting the available tools and technologies for supporting the mobility, agility, and self-sufficiency of the aging population as well as the challenges associated with the integration of these technologies into the everyday lives of elderly individuals, this publication is ideally designed for reference use by healthcare workers, medical students, gerontologists, and IT developers in the field of medicine.

Yosry Morsis area of expertise is in tissue engineering of heart valves, and mathematical modelling and processing. The research into tissue engineering of heart valves in Australia is deemed a niche area of research due to the high complexity of simulating a natural heart valve. The research conducted by this group is ultimately aimed at the creation of living heart valves as replacement entities rather than using the current option of artificial heart valves. Biocompatible and biodegradable materials will be used as scaffolds to reduce the risk of host rejection. Thus far, a polyurethane tri-leaflet heart valve scaffold has been created and the design is constantly refined to achieve the optimal haemodynamic characteristics so as to simulate natural heart valves. Work of the BTE group has been nationally and internationally recognised in the areas of modelling mechanics, biomechanics and soft tissue engineering of heart valves. He has over 150 publications with H Index of 14 and is Member of the Editorial Boards of three international journals.

Anupam Shukla is an Associate Professor in the Information and Communication Technology Department of Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior, India. He has 21 years of teaching experience. His research interest includes Artificial Intelligence, Soft Computing, Biometrics, Bio-Medical Engineering, Bioinformatics Robotics, Animation and Signal processing. He has published around 100 papers in various national and international journals/conferences, authored nine book chapters and a book from CRC press. He is the editor and reviewer for reputed international journals/books/conferences; and also member of program and technical committees at international conferences.