A remote behavioral monitoring system for elders living alone

This paper describes a remote monitoring system under developing to assess the health status and/or daily activities of elders who live alone. The developed system is composed of an in-house sensing system and a server system. The in-house sensing system uses a PC and a set of wireless sensor nodes based on the Tiny OS. By using a pyroelectric infrared sensor, the node detects a motion of elder and sends it to a database. The server system has a database server and a Web server, which provides useful information to caregivers for more cost effective intelligent care service. We have evaluated the monitoring system through 3 months continuous operation with installation of 9 elders' house. The experimental results show the promising possibilities to estimate the behavioral patterns and the current status of elder even though the simplicity of sensing capability.