Process View for Active and Healthy Aging

Abstract

 Active  and  Healthy  Aging  (AHA)  is  one  of  the  growing  concerns  and  aims  of  a sustainable society and thus a focus of the European Union. The adoption of a process view and the analysis of the processes to be performed has brought about numerous advantages to business organizations  and  industrial  enterprizes.  Advantages  range  from  clarity,  understandability,  and teachability to increased efficiency due to assessment and measurements of quality and capability.

The basic idea of the process view is to describe necessary activities on an abstract level (i.e. as activity types) and organize these abstracted activities (together with abstracted work products) in a  process  model.  Individual  processes  are  derived  (instantiated)  from  the  process  model  to  be enacted.

In this paper we investigate, as a continuation of (Chroust, 2017) and (Chroust and Aumayr, 2017), the challenge of applying a process view to health support for elderly persons ("AHA", Active  and  Healthy  Aging (univ.Torino, 2016))  and  identify  the  differences  from  classical  applications  (software engineering, office automation, business intelligence, ...).

We will turn our special attention to activities which can be designed to be performed by a Senior  himself/herself,  by  helpers  from  different  professions,  and  by  machines  (computers)  of varying capability and diversity. The variability of the capability of elderly people obviously has to be taken into account by the support system by providing alternative implementations of the same support activity task depending on the capability of an individual Senior.

A discussion about the possibilities to assess the quality of AHA-processes and their support by a Model Interpreter closes the paper.