Technologies in Palliative Care for Older People

This book provides a comprehensive overview of palliative care digital health by covering current developments, methodology, clinical relevance, research priorities, ethical issues, and policy related to technological innovations for those with serious illness. This type of book does not currently exist in the literature, as previous work primarily focuses on digital health for early identification of disease and facilitating self-care or ‘aging in place’ practices. This book addresses the lack of focus on digital health for people with palliative care needs. This book has a special focus on the needs of individuals as their health worsens throughout their illness. Consequently, the reader will benefit from this book’s focus on the science, methodology, application, and practicality of digital health developments in palliative care.

This book explores the barriers that prevent the meaningful use of digital health in palliative care, including expenses, interoperability issues, data privacy and security concerns, lack of effectiveness and equity, and the concern that technology may reduce face-to-face consultations between patients and clinicians. There is an overall lack of consensus about digital health research priorities in palliative care, and a lack of theories about how these technologies might improve care outcomes. Therefore, this book emphasizes the importance of identifying, discussing, and debating how technological innovations can be meaningfully used to ensure that frail people have appropriate access to palliative care services. Consequently, this book begins the conversation about articulating digital health research priorities in palliative care to determine how finite resources should be allocated to a field saturated with rapidly developing innovation.