Low Power Wearable Device for Elderly People Monitoring

摘要

Automatization when monitoring elderly patients can improve their living conditions and even, reduce the consequences of some events, e.g. falls, what can be fatal in some cases for such people. Continuous monitoring of vital parameters allows detecting diseases in an early state. In this paper, we propose a wrist-wearable low-power device able to monitor body physiological signals as temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and monitor daily activities and on this basis to detect falls. The device is also able to transmit and receive data with an Android App using a Bluetooth Low-Energy interface. For counting the beats, we propose a novel low processing consumption peak detection algorithm. For detecting the oxygen saturation some approaches have been followed (in time and frequency domains) to obtain the attributes for the further functional analyses of the monitoring process. The results show the monitoring and tracking functionalities of this wearable. Tests performed shows the good performing of all sensors, being able to measure body temperature, detect and measure heart rate and oxygen saturation with less than a 2% of deviation and detect mostly of the most usual fall types; all this integrated in a low-power low-size solution. As the conclusion, the viability of this implementation has been more than proved given the fact that some providers are interested in deploying such wearable in their elderly home residences. A low-cost and low-power device IoT system can be integrated into the existing care workflow and may reduce patient fall risk being an elusive patient safety challenge based on the technological gadget.