Distributed pervasive sensing system for elderly care

• Main Author: Bharti Goel.
• Other Authors: Chan Syin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Life and medical sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/49131
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Elderly people require assistance with several daily activities due to age-related decline in physical and mental capabilities. Many of them also need constant monitoring by care givers. Such round the clock manual monitoring is costly as well as labor intensive. There is a need to develop an automatic pervasive sensing system which can monitor the activities of the elderly on a 24-hour basis and provide an appropriate alert to the care givers as soon as it required. One problem commonly faced by the elderly people is incontinence – the inability to control urination. This problem is difficult to manage both for patients as well as care givers. Current manual care practices are not able to promptly detect soiled, wet diapers. Patients can end up lying in soiled diapers for long periods of time. This can lead to undesirable consequences which have both medical and social implications. There is a need to develop an intelligent system which can assist the care givers in managing incontinence promptly and efficiently Incontinence Management System (iCMS) has been developed by the Institute of Infocomm Research, Singapore to enable timely change of diapers by sensing diaper wetness and prompting an assistance alert. The system consists of three tiers – sensing tier for sensing diaper wetness, the networking tier for forwarding the wetness event messages to a central location and finally an intelligent system, which logs the wetness events and raises alerts to the care givers. The purpose of this FYP project is to study the current iCMS system, identify the shortcoming, propose additional features for solving these shortcomings and implement those features. Several features have been proposed for all the three tiers which make the system more reliable. However, implementation was concentrated mainly on the sensing tier and the intelligent system. At the sensing tier, additional interfaces like I2C and UART have been implemented to interface peripherals like pressure sensors and GSM modem with the sensing node. This new capability opens the door to a whole range of new sensors which use same interfaces but have different sensing capabilities. This will provide an ability to widen the range of sensing capabilities of the system. Additionally, higher level development work was done at the intelligent system. Here the functionality of sending SMS alert and receiving acknowledgement from the care giver has been integrated with the whole system to make it a more robust and complete system.