Improving life quality for the elderly through the Social Internet of Things (SIoT)

The average age of the world's population is increasing, and life expectancy will increase by an extra 10 years by the year 2050. The growing number of older adults increases the demands on public health systems and the related care costs. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to support integrated healthcare services in elderly homecare can make an important contribution to reducing such costs. The SOCIALIZE AAL project aims to create a new reference platform for the elderly by applying technological solutions to simplify their daily activities and the means by which they access dedicated services in order to improve their quality of life. This paper describes the Elderly Monitoring service - an IoT module of the SOCIALIZE platform, whose aim is to collect environmental and physical user data so that they can be supervised by medical and caregiver staffs. The system has been designed to enable easy addition and/or substitution of new services and devices within the environment. To this end, the service implements a framework that enables heterogeneous devices belonging to different domotic systems and protocols to directly share data, thereby implementing an infrastructure suitable for the fulfillment of a real Social IoT (SIoT).