Implement a Portable Smart Device for Elder Health Care

Abstract

The population structure of Taiwan is evolving toward aged society. The ratio of elderly population over total population is increasingly approaching to 1/4 or above, leading to the increasing demand of the aged care in Taiwanese society. Further the increasing the long-term care cost would have a great impact on National financial burden. As for the delimitation on the growth rate of the elder population, we would like to develop an auxiliary aid capable of reminding people’s daily exercise, as well as detecting the people’s aged degree. In this study we implement such an aid by a cost-effective, intelligent ring type sensor capable of measuring people’s essential tremor as well as recording people’s daily exercise/showing them up at a user friendly interface. Based on the state of the art sensor technology, the intelligent sensor comes out to be capable of recording aged people’s essential tremor spectrum via fast Fourier transform (FFT) and their daily exercise simultaneously. With gathering both of detecting information, the sensor would be transmitting the information in a real-time fashion toward people’s cellular phone via a Bluetooth interface. Then an application on the phone could evaluate the degree of the aging and show the daily sport records toward the medical staff at the remote site. In order encourage elderly people to exercise and prevent elderly people from falling accidentally, the device also has fall warning function. It is believed via such a surveillance on elder people and referring their daily sport records in a long term fashion, the phenomenon of population aging could be effectively improved.