Indoor-Outdoor Tracking and Activity Monitoring System for Dementia Patients

Enabling the elderly to live independently and to maintain their quality of life at home for as long as possible constitutes a major public health challenge, especially in rural and semi-urban environments where the access to formal care may be difficult. Tracking and activity monitoring allows to detect when skills for daily activities are going down to provide timely treatments and avoid future complications. This work presents an IoT system based on a wearable prototype intended for indoor and outdoor tracking and physical activity monitoring of dementia patients in remote locations. For this purpose, the wearable developed makes use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for outdoor tracking, a developed indoor symbolic location system based on infrared signals, a step detector using an accelerometer and LoRaWAN communications. Positioning information is presented to caregivers or healthcare staff through an accessible web platform, which allows the visualization of the trajectories followed by patients over the last few weeks, together with information about room occupancy in indoor environments and physical activity. These data can be used to detect anomalous changes in daily patients' routines or to know the user's position in cases where the patient may have become disoriented. The proposed system encourages the autonomy of dementia patients and allows information about the disease's progression to be extracted.