Sensor network for supporting elderly care home

The paper presents an ultrasonic sensor network system that can be utilized in elderly care homes. One of the problems of an aging society is the shortage of carers in homes for the aged; the shortage imposes an increasing workload on carers and leads to a deterioration of the quality of care for the elderly. The authors developed an ultrasonic sensor network system to reduce the workload on carers. The system monitors the elderly people in a nursing room continuously and remotely, and, when it detects accident-prone events or accidents of the elderly, it notifies carers about the occurrence of such events. The system was installed in a nursing home in Tokyo and has been running for several months. The paper describes the background of the research, the system overview, and results obtained during its real operation.