Abstract
This paper presents a few meal-monitoring systems for elder residents (especially patients) in LTCFs by using electronic weight and temperature sensors. These monitoring systems enable to convey the information of the amount of meal taken by the patients in real-time via wireless communication networks onto the mobile phones of their nurses in charge or families. Thereby, the nurses can easily spot the most patients who need immediate assistance, while the families can have relief in seeing the crucial information for the well-being of their parents at least three times a day. Meanwhile, the patients tend to suffer burns of their tongues because they can hardly recognize the temperature of hot meals served. This situation can be avoided by utilizing the meal temperature-monitoring system, which displays an alarm to the patients when the meal temperature is above the reference. These meal-monitoring systems can be easily implemented by utilizing low-cost sensor chips and Arduino NANO boards so that elder-care hospitals and nursing homes can afford to exploit them with no additional cost. Hence, we believe that the proposed monitoring systems would be a potential solution to provide a great help and relief for the professional nurses working in elder-care hospitals and nursing homes.
Highlights
In 2000, the global population aged over 60 was only 11%, and it was predicted that it would be doubled by 2050, reaching 22% of the total population
75~88% of the elders in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) suffer from cognitive impairment and are affected by diseases such as dementia, stroke, and Parkinson’s disease [4,5]
We propose two meal-monitoring systems using electronic sensor devices in order to implement the automatic functions of both alerting the patients the meal temperature and conveying the food diary information of the patients
Summary
In 2000, the global population aged over 60 was only 11%, and it was predicted that it would be doubled by 2050, reaching 22% of the total population. As of 2018, the number of nurses in elderly care facilities in South Korea was 1472, which indicates that there is one registered nurse available for care per every 111 elders [17] In these inadequate situations, we believe that it would be a great help and relief to nurses to provide a meal-monitoring system that enables them to figure out how much food each patient has been eating in real-time at least three times a day. We propose two meal-monitoring systems using electronic sensor devices in order to implement the automatic functions of both alerting the patients the meal temperature and conveying the food diary information of the patients (or the elders in LTCFs) to their nurses and/or families via wireless transfer in real time [26,27].
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