Supporting Elderly People During Medical Emergencies: An Informal Caregiver-based Approach

Globally, an increasing number of elderly people live alone at home either by choice or out of compulsion, and many have health issues. During a medical emergency involving an elderly person living alone, getting prompt access to formal medical aids like calling an ambulance or paramedics can be critical. Moreover, an ambulance can also arrive late adding to the patient's suffering. In such situations, informal caregivers can act as first responders to attend to the patients even before an ambulance arrives. The selection of appropriate informal caregivers to attend a medical emergency incident remains a key issue and this paper proposes an informal caregiver selection process based on certain pre-defined characteristics of informal caregivers. Single and ensemble multiclass classification algorithms are considered in this work to rank informal caregivers and preliminary simulation results have shown that ensemble models perform better than single models.