OPTIMAL AUTO-REMINDER-CALLING ALGORITHM FOR SELF-REPORTING TYPE SAFETY MONITORING SYSTEM BY USING TELEPHONE FOR ELDERLY PEOPLE

摘要

An increasingly aging society is a significant problem in advanced countries. Safety monitoring is required for elderly people especially in a rural area. This paper describes a self-reporting type safety monitoring system by using telephone and the field experimental results in Iwate prefecture and Aomori Prefecture in Tohoku area of Japan. In this system, a user (an elderly person) makes a daily wellness call to the Iwate Prefecture Council of Social Welfare (IPCSW). The IPCSW staff calls the user to check his/her wellness if no wellness-report is received from the user. However, the system introduced a new work load to the IPCSW staff when many users forgot to make the call. Our project is to reduce the staff's phone work load by an automatic wellness-report reminder call. In this paper, the daily reporting time of long-term using users is analyzed and a new algorithm to determine an optimal auto-calling scheduler for each user based on the analyzed results is proposed.