Augmented Reality-Based Health-Care and Emergency-Treatment System for the Elderly

Abstract

With the rapid aging of society and the transition to nuclear families, the number of elderly families living alone with chronic diseases is also increasing. Therefore, it is necessary to support health management for chronic diseases of senior citizens and to provide a life-saving method to cope with emergencies. By introducing a smart elderly-care service through augmented reality (AR) and IT convergence, old people can manage their health from chronic diseases and respond to emergencies such as cardiac arrest. This paper proposes an AR-based smartphone app that helps the elderly to manage their health with hand acupuncture, and to save the life from cardiac arrest using cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) treatment. Through the network between hand acupuncture server and smartphone, we have developed AR-based hand acupuncture therapy in smartphones, with which the old can manage their health from the chronic disease at home. Besides, an AR-based CPR support system is proposed as an emergency measure for elderly families suffering from sudden cardiopulmonary arrest. With this system, we were able to provide visual and auditory guidance to the elderly around emergency patients to perform accurate and fast CPR. Conventional AR technology is widely used in games, shopping, education, medical care, architecture, travel, while few studies have been done in AR technology as a means of managing the health of old people or saving lives from emergencies. Therefore, we have developed an AR-based application that finds exact points of hand acupuncture therapy for chronic disease and gives direction on how to do CPR properly. By implementing an elderly-friendly app with two functions in the smartphone, we believe that the app could contribute to the elderly managing their health at home and saving the lives of partners from cardiac arrest situations. If the proposed system is adopted by elderly families living alone or with an old partner, the old will be able to lead independent lives healthily and safely at home. In the future, further research on how to increase the applications of hand acupuncture therapy and improve the accuracy and efficiency in training laypeople CPR skills.