Stream-based wandering monitoring system for elderly people with dementia

Statistics reported by the United Nations indicate that the elderly population has grown rapidly and continuously. These indicators illustrate the fact that we are entering into the era of aging population. The elderly are usually faced with many problems resulting from the deterioration of health with increasing age. One of the major problems comes in the form of a decline in mental ability, commonly called dementia. This problem leads to wandering behavior - aimless movement, repetitive locomotion with no identifiable goal and disorientation to time and place. The wandering behavior often results in negative consequences such as getting lost and serious injuries or eventually death. To control and reduce negative consequences associated with wandering, we propose a novel wandering monitoring system that timely detect wandering patterns in the elderly with dementia movement. Our system applies a stream processing technique together with GPS technology to identify location and detect wandering behavior of the elderly in real-time. The experimental results show that our wandering monitoring system offers low-latency processing and can provide real-time and instantaneous responses. The average latency about 1 ms per additional elderly patient was observed with reasonable processing overheads.