Activity Monitoring and Location Sensory System for People With Mild Cognitive Impairments

Abstract

Cognitive impairment diseases are becoming more and more prevalent mainly due to population aging and the increase in life expectancy. Sensory and monitoring systems may allow people with mild cognitive impairments (MCIs) or at early stages of dementia to live at home for longer with more independence and security. This work presents a wireless sensor network (WSN) based on wearables that obtains indoor and outdoor location and step information, reporting them over a long-range WAN (LoRaWAN) network. Each wireless wearable sensor (WWS) uses a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) module for outdoor positioning, a proposed indoor room-level localization system based on infrared sensors, an accelerometer for a step detector algorithm, and a long-range (LoRa) radio link to send the measured information with low-power consumption achieving a large coverage range. These sensory data are recorded in a database and presented to the medical services and caregivers through a user web application. This can be used to detect anomalous changes in daily patients’ routines, as well as to know the user’s position in cases where the patient may be disoriented. In addition, alerts are launched in caregivers’ smartphones to report about any risky situation, such as the patient leaving an allowed area or staying in one place for too long. Therefore, the proposed sensory system may support and extend the ability of people with MCI or at early stages of dementia to live independently, it helps detect behavioral changes and it keeps caregivers’ peace of mind.