Authors:
Paulo Gonçalves
1
;
José Torres
2
;
Pedro Sobral
1
and
Rui Moreira
2
Affiliations:
1
Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia, Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Portugal
;
2
Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Portugal
Abstract:
The humanity is currently facing the difficulties of an aged society with an ever-growing predominance of chronic diseases and associated problems (e.g., mobility issues, possibility of falls, etc.). Traditional hospital or clinical internment is not an efficient answer both in terms of human, therapeutic or economical aspects. Alternatively, ambulatory and home healthcare are becoming preferred and predominant solutions. However, the typical home environment is not suited nor prepared for monitoring and helping to take care of elderly and/or disabled people. To overcome some of these issues, this paper proposes a wireless low cost hardware solution based on a microcontroller with several sensors (cf. temperature, oxymeter, 3-axis accelerometer) which allows monitoring several physiological parameters (e.g., temperature, heart bit, etc.) and infer human activities (e.g., standing, walking, falling, etc.) of home confined people. A similar platform with ambient temperature and light s
ensors was also created for monitoring the home environment. The collected data is pre-processed on the sensor nodes and then transmitted to a wireless gateway allowing the backend system to log the patient activity, his health condition as well as the living surroundings. Finally, a web application is provided to healthcare professionals for viewing, analyzing and statistically operating this information, thus empowering homecare.
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