The Intelligent Room for Elderly Care

Abstract

Abstract. Daily life assistance for elderly is one of the most promising and interesting scenarios for advanced technologies in the near future. Improving the quality of life of elderly is also some of the first priorities in modern countries and societies where the percentage of elder people is rapidly increasing due mainly to great improvements in medicine during the last decades. In this paper, we present an overview of our informationally structured room that supports daily life activities of elderly with the aim of improving their quality of life. Our environment contains different distributed sensors including a floor sensing system and several intelligent cabinets. Sensor information is sent to a centralized management system which processes the data and makes it available to a service robot which assists the people in the room. One important restriction in our intelligent environment is to maintain a small number of sensors to avoid interfering with the daily activities of people and to reduce as much as possible the invasion of their privacy. In addition we discuss some experiments using our real environment and robot.

Smart Solutions in Elderly Care Facilities with RFID System and Its Integration with Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The RFID system stores and retrieves data through electromagnetic transmission to an integrated circuit compatible with the radio frequency (RF); on the other hand, a sensor network is typically used to sense and monitor physical, chemical, and biological environments by sensing their sound, temperature, and light, among others. A number of studies have considered the sensors in the elderly individuals' lives in home or hospital environments [21–27]. Integrating the RFID system with a sensor network can complement both of them because, with sensors, temperature, pressure, humidity, motion, and pulse rate data, among others, can be monitored and obtained.…”