Health activities monitoring and warning system for geriatric daily living in extra care homes

This paper presents wireless sensor network based intelligent health monitoring and alarm system (IHMAS) that not only records a solitary elder's activities of daily life (ADLs) and monitors body health data but also sends warning messages when abnormal behaviors or health conditions are detected. The abnormal behaviors considered in this system are: i) sudden falling down, ii) excessive shower time, iii) high body temperature, iv) abnormal heart rate, v) lack of outdoor activities, and vi) getting lost. Furthermore, the IHMAS uses collected data to build a personal health database that can be used to assess and analyze the elder's psychological and physical health conditions. The ADLs and body health data are captured and recorded by body monitoring slippers and environment sensing system. The data processing unit synchronizes as well as analyzes the data to extract information and builds a personal health database. The warning functions are performed by the execution unit. To test the proposed health monitoring system, the IHMAS is installed in a volunteer's home for two typical days. The data from the wireless sensor network is collected and analyzed in real time. A number of use cases and the warning conditions were tested in real time and some of them are presented in this paper. The utilization of Grubbs test is proposed to examine the elder's abnormal behaviors, which is presented in the verification section. The preliminary diagnosis results of a user's health condition are obtained by analyzing the data from personal health database. The major contributions of this work are the design and development of the comprehensive system that has the capability to collect relevant data, build a personal health profile with a database, detect abnormal behaviors in real time, and respond to emergencies in order to protect older persons, living by themselves, who are most likely to encounter accidents at home.