First Report

Abstract

Nowadays there aren’t many tools that assist elderly people in their daily activities. Our main goal is to develop a set of tools that will be able to monitor and assist the elderly, helping them maintain normal life. Instead of feeling stressed and having to remember when to take medicines, eat or monitor their blood pressure, these tasks will be handled by our tools, helping the elderly feel more relaxed and focus on other aspects of their life.

This project will be a part of a much broader system, The Smart City. Instead of having people, who are prone to errors and exhaustion, monitor and manage the city, we believe the future lies in moving to autonomous system. Our project focuses on the elderly in this smart city.

Introduction

General Project Description

We will develop an autonomous system which will incorporate a number of monitoring tools that receive data from house sensors. Those tools process the data and verifies the elder person is not in distress, and maintains his mandatory daily activities - such as taking his medication.

Programming Environment

Our project will be written in the Java programming language, using the Eclipse neon IDE as our development environment.

Theoretical Background

Smart City

Smart City is a development vision to integrate information gathered from different sources, sensors and communication technologies in order to improve the residents’ quality of life. Information is used to improve and enhance the services given to the residents.

Statistics

According to data gathered from the Central Bureau of Statistics, in the last couple of years there has been an incrementation of the portion of elderly population and it is nowadays 11.1%. By the forecasts by the year of 2035, 14.6 percent of the population in Israel will be over the age of 65 years. In 2015, 87% of the citizens over the age of 85 were living in their houses (in contrary of assisting living) and out of them about 23% are living alone.

Basic System Functionalities

Single home management

• Allows adjusting the home system to the elder’s schedule. It can be initialized based on static input about the elder’s hours of activity, taken medication, level of mobility (wheelchair, cane, not assisted)

• The system will learn dynamically the elder’s patterns of of behavior in order to identify dangerous irregularities that might imply that external assistance is needed. e.g.

  • Time of shower will be monitored
  • The sleep patterns and duration will be learnt

• The system will allow personal definitions of emergencies and contacts in those cases, allowing the elder to decide the level of assistance needed. e.g. A small emergency can result in an SMS to a family member, while a serious one might result in immediate contact with a hospital.

• Process data from different sensors in the elder’s home

Community management

• Allows a system admin to receive information about dangerous deviation from the norm in the elderly community, making it possible to have live and quick reaction in time of need.

• Have a division of the elderly by risk levels, allowing an adjustable level of supervision on different parts of community

• Have an association between different groups and their and their closest emergency services (by physical proximity)

Software Implementation

Modules

Sensors Simulator

A module that will simulate sensors inside the house automatically. Because we don’t have real sensors, this module will be the only way to test our system. Examples for sensors:

• Sitting sensor (senses if the elder is sitting)
• Motion sensors (to monitor the movement of the elder around the house)
• Wristband sensor (with pulse sensor and etc.)
• SOS button

Information Processing (lots of big data, ML & AI elements)

The core of this project will be receiving data from our sensors, storing them in databases, processing the information and make decisions based on the processed information.

GUI

The GUI will be developed to monitor the system. It will show the state of the sensors deployed (or the state of the simulators, in the early stages). The design will be such that navigation between the sensors is going to be easy and fluid. When a sensor is selected, information about it will be displayed, allowing the user to check on the elderly and make sure everything goes as planned.

References

• The Central Bureau of Statistics - http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/?MIval=cw_usr_view_Folder&ID=141