ELCARE: A Novel Approach for Educating Caretakers of Elderly

14th European Conference on E-Learning (ECEL) -- OCT 29-30, 2015 -- Univ Hertfordshire, Hatfield, ENGLANDWOS: 000371972900084Elderly care, or simply eldercare, is the fulfillment of the special needs and requirements that are unique to senior citizens. Elderly care emphasizes the social and personal requirements of senior citizens who need some assistance for daily activities and health care, but who desire to age with dignity. With the improvements made in health technologies, the life expectancy in EU is increasing and more than 80 million people are aged over 60 in Europe today. Experts believe that the increasing number of elderly people who need help with basic tasks, but have been left to struggle by an unprecedented withdrawal of state-funded social care, create a huge problem; lack of nurses/caretakers for the elderly. This paper discusses an e-learning system for elderly care that simply educates/trains the people who want to take care of the elderly; either those who want to become professional caretakers or those who are volunteers or social workers. The novel system inherits web and mobile apps and will be deployed multilingual. The main goal of the system is to increase the social, intellectual and cognitive abilities of the target group like increasing the patience, devotion, physical endurance etc. The system is buildup of modules that have a linear character, i.e. user has to pass a module successfully in order to proceed to the next one