Eldercare Smart Home Sensor Based System: Approach, Deployment and Insights

The population is aging rapidly and the number of elderly people will continue increasing. With the recent advances in technology, emergent research has been conducted in order to tackle the possibility of using various types of sensors deployed in the homes of elderly people to gather data from their environment and physiology. One objective is directed toward correlating this data to activities of daily living (ADL’s), find patterns in these activities or data and examine whether there are deviations from normal.In this paper, we present the knowledge and experience gained from deploying a smart home system using affordable, accessible and non-intrusive sensors into four homes. The sensor types are specifically chosen to keep the privacy and limit the resentment of the individual in mind. We have been collecting data since November 2021 and will continue gathering data, recruiting elders and improving the system. We present the system components and examples of sensor data received on the server side of the system. Insights on potential placements of the sensors and the possible alternatives are given to guide future research that aims to deploy quickly and efficiently a consumer grade smart home system for health monitoring. In the end, we report the challenges and lessons learned from deploying in a real-world environment.