Abstract
Population ageing is having a direct influence on serious health issues, including hampered mobility and physical decline. Good habits in performing physical activities, in addition to eating and drinking, are essential to improve the life quality of the elderly population. Technological solutions, aiming at increasing awareness or providing reminders to eat/drink regularly, can have a significant impact in this scenario. These solutions enable the possibility to constantly monitor deviations from users’ normal behavior, thus allowing reminders to be provided to users/caregivers. In this context, this paper presents a radio-frequency identification (RFID) system to monitor user’s habits, such as the use of food, beverages, and/or drugs. The device was optimized to fulfill specifications imposed by the addressed application. The approach could be extended for the monitoring of home appliances, environment exploitation, and activity rate. Advantages of the approach compared to other solutions, e.g., based on cameras, are related to the low level of invasiveness and flexibility of the adopted technology. A major contribution of this paper is related to the wide investigation of system behavior, which is aimed to define the optimal working conditions of the system, with regards to the power budget, user (antenna)-tag reading range, and the optimal inter-tag distance. To investigate the performance of the system in tag detection, experiments were performed in a scenario replicating a home environment. To achieve this aim, specificity and sensitivity indexes were computed to provide an objective evaluation of the system performance. For the case considered, if proper conditions are meet, a specificity value of 0.9 and a sensitivity value of 1 were estimated.
Highlights
Society is currently undergoing gradual population ageing, which is increasing the incidence of health issues, including mobility, physical decline, and chronic diseases
They often experience reduced appetite and thirst [3], leading to poor habits that can have dangerous physical consequences [4,5,6,7,8]. These aspects are important because proper activity and correct nutrition/hydration can reduce the incidence of age-related traumas such as postural instability and falls, and more generally, physical decline
It must be underlined that similar applications in the literature make use of static devices placed in the environment and invasive measurement systems installed in the target, and do not perform user identification
Summary
Society is currently undergoing gradual population ageing, which is increasing the incidence of health issues, including mobility, physical decline, and chronic diseases. The advantages of the adopted technology compared other solutions, such as vision systems, switches, or other sensors, relate to its low level of invasiveness; good flexibility in terms of tag distribution, re-allocation, and quantity; ease of use and installation; and the unique identification of the user interacting with targets in the environment All of these features are essential in effective assistive devices. It must be underlined that similar applications in the literature make use of static devices placed in the environment and invasive measurement systems installed in the target, and do not perform user identification (in the case of water intake, previous research has proposed the use of a sensorized bottle or the use of inertial sensors in the bottle itself) As previously stated, these solutions do not provide a flexible way to monitor a user’s behavior nor to understand which user is performing a given action. These preliminary results demonstrate the system reliability when used in a real scenario
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