ULTRASONIC SENSORS FOR THE ELDERLY AND CAREGIVERS IN A NURSING HOME

摘要

Workloads on caregivers in nursing home are increasing as the imbalance between the number of elderly people and that of caregivers becomes larger. Excessive workloads on caregivers must be reduced not only because they become burdens for caregivers but also because they deteriorate the quality of nursing care. One of such workloads is routine patrol for monitoring the status of the elderly and for detecting accidents on the elderly as soon as possible. If the number of unnecessary patrols is minimized, caregivers will be able to spend their time on high touch care and humane communication. The authors have been developing an ultrasonic 3D tag system which locate ultrasonic tags in real time, and employed the system in a nursing home to monitor positions of the elderly people. If the system locates the elderly people continuously and robustly, and if it can notify caregivers about the occurrence of accident-prone activities promptly, caregivers will be releaved from their unnecessary workloads. This paper describes the research background, system overview, system implementations, and experimental results.