An Arduino based Health Monitoring System for Elderly People Living at Home - Functions and Ontology

Abstract

In recent decades, people, especially the older ones, try to live at home in autonomous way. For this purpose it is useful to monitor their vital signs and the environment that surrounds them with the aim of activating suitable environment regulation and when needed to send alarms to family members, medical, or hospitals, according to the criticality of the subject. The paper aims at proposing a flexible and reliable monitoring system based on Arduino shields. The main feature of the system is that it allows the doctor and family members to monitor the patients at distance using their mobiles. A suitable communication with the first aid center is foreseen for a fast rescue of the patients in case of critical situations. The general user model ontology is used so that the personal data featuring the patients and the relevant context may be used by any diagnostic and first aid software, thus envisaging an open and interoperable health monitoring system for elderly people living at home.