Using IoT and cloud technologies in monitoring systems for elderly

The reports of the United Nation on world population reveals that the number of people over 60 years of age has been increasing rapidly in the last years and will continue to do so in the coming decades. The World Health Organization has underlined that even if severe health issues that confronted our ancestors in their older years have been addressed by modern medicine, the general health of older people now it's not much different of those of their parents. The same issues must be addressed in helping the elderly maintain a healthy and rewarding lifestyle. Here, the Information Technology can help, by providing the elderly and their formal or informal caregivers with the tools to detect changes in behavior that can have negative impact on the well-being. The NOAH (NOt Alone at Home) system uses IoT enabled sensors for unobtrusive monitoring of behaviour of elderly inside their home to address these issues. The scope of this paper is to describe the cloud solution employed in developing the software solutions for the NOAH system. The main features of this systems are the collecting of data from sensors installed inside end-users' homes, the processing and interpreting of this data in order to provide relevant information to its users. The server side was implemented as a service in a cloud computing environment with the goal to integrate and optimize the process of collecting data and serving it to different internal or external modules. Using cloud computing advantages, NOAH server system consists of services and applications interacting among each other through a standardized REST interface.