Evaluation of Sigfox LPWAN for sensor-enabled homes to identify at risk community dwelling seniors

• Main Authors: TAN, Crys, TAN, Hwee-pink
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: at risk community dwelling seniors; LPWAN; sensor-enabled homes; Sigfox; system costs; system lifespan; Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6868; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7871/viewcontent/08990768.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

It is projected that Singapore will become superaged (where 20% of its population will comprise seniors) by 2025. Although various community programs are available to promote active ageing among seniors who are well, provide befriending services for seniors at risk of isolation and care and support for frail and vulnerable seniors, it is not easy to differentiate between `well' seniors and `at risk' seniors. While privacy-preserving z-wave based sensor-enabled homes have been piloted in 100 homes of seniors living alone and have been successful in the timely detection of at-risk seniors, they have limited scalability due to high costs, reliability issues and high maintenance needs. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate Sigfox-based sensor-enabled homes for detecting of at-risk seniors, benchmark our results against the incumbent system, and study the tradeoffs between battery lifespan and detection accuracy. From the evaluation, we observe that while maintaining a similar battery lifespan, the Sigfox-based system is able to match the accuracy in detecting at-risk seniors at a fraction of the cost of the incumbent sensor system.