Many people have an elderly relative who lives alone. Eventually this becomes a worry. Making daily visits or even twice-daily phonecalls is not an option for most people, and the elderly relative might not appreciate it either.
Some minimally-intrusive way to provide reassurance and to raise the alarm when needed would be a great help to many people.
The Monitoring Mum project aims to identify or design hardware and software to support this monitoring and alerting function. The aim is for the whole system to be open source with open hardware, and for it to be usable both in private closed networks and with commercial service providers.
Ideally, such a system should be installable by someone with minimal technical knowledge:
- Buy a Monitoring Mum kit, which arrives in a single box.
- Unpack it and spread the parts around Mum's house
- Use a simple website to list contacts to be informed of problems
To be that simple would require:
- Most sensors to be battery powered, with a battery life of a year or more
- Wireless comms for everything
- No requirement for an existing home network
- A central trustworthy website to act as control and alarm distribution point
- A learning algorithm to determine 'normal behaviour'
Meeting all requirements at a reasonable price would be a challenge, but how close can we get?