Developing an IoT Platform for the Elderly Health Care

Abstract

The health care of elderly people addresses the necessity for services that utilize recent technologies and devices. Now-a-days, both loneliness and psychological depressions are typical problems which elderly people face because of living alone/abandoned or reduced communication with their children and relatives. This paper presents the development of an integrated platform using the Internet of Things to manage and provide extensive services for elderly people to address the aforementioned issues. The proposed platform relies on wearable sensor devices to collect real-time data and store it in a cloud server via a developed smartphone application. The cloud server is accessed to retrieve data stored using the OAuth protocol. A web-based database-driven application is developed that facilitates the management of helpful information about elderly people to an authorized person. The doctors can perform real-time monitoring of the health condition of their elder patients remotely, and the system generates an alarm and sends notifications to caregivers and doctors in case of emergency. The conducted experiments and the achieved results showed that the developed platform has remarkable features of accessibility, security, efficiency, and cost.