Monitoring Wheelchair Users in Care Facilities with BLE Beacons Attached to Wheels

As the human life span continues to increase due, the shortage of caregivers in nursing homes has become critical. In elderly nursing homes, health is maintained by good nutrition, physical rehabilitation, and the monitoring of many daily tasks that require assistance. Various methods were proposed in previous human-monitoring studies, including acceleration sensors and changes in power consumption. Unfortunately, these techniques do not apply to wheelchair users, and the costs of introducing and operating them are high. In this research, we develop a low-cost monitoring method for wheelchair users that uses BLE beacons that determine the amount of wheel rotations and whether the user is being self-propelled or pushed. Since the radio waves transmitted by BLE beacons are weak, the radio wave strength can be easily changed by the distance and direction of the receiver. Using this receiver feature, we installed a BLE beacon to the wheels of a wheelchair and the uniforms of caregivers and estimated their movements from the changes in the strength of the received radio waves. Using the proposed method, we estimated the number of wheel rotations with 100% accuracy and distinguished between self-propelling and being pushed with 93.0% accuracy.