Abstract
The pandemic declared by the World Health Organization due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) awakened us to a reality that most of us were previously unaware of—isolation, confinement and the massive use of information and communication technologies, as well as increased knowledge of the difficulties and limitations of their use. This article focuses on the rapid implementation of low-cost technologies, which allow us to answer a fundamental question: how can near real-time monitoring and follow-up of the elderly and their health conditions, as well as their homes, especially for those living in isolated and remote areas, be provided within their care and protect them from risky events? The system proposed here as a proof of concept uses low-cost devices for communication and data processing, supported by Long-Range (LoRa) technology and connection to The Things Network, incorporating various sensors, both personal and in the residence, allowing family members, neighbors and authorized entities, including security forces, to have access to the health condition of system users and the habitability of their homes, as well as their urgent needs, thus evidencing that it is possible, using low-cost systems, to implement sensor networks for monitoring the elderly using the LoRa gateway and other support infrastructures.
Highlights
Since the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, a virus discovered in 2019 [1], one of the fundamental concerns was the elderly population, namely due to the impact that the disease caused by the new coronavirus could have on the population in this age group (65 years old or more) [2].Until several solutions for the surveillance of the elderly in a residential context had been advanced by the electronic industry, information technology and entities related to the protection of property and the security of people, allied to well-being and home automation [3,4,5,6,7,8]
In the present work, we propose the real-time monitoring of the movement of elderly people, who are prone to eventual falls, as well as their state of health, both inside of their houses and in the surrounding area, while monitoring their ability to move, their pulse and their fatigue resistance, using sensors incorporated in non-intrusive pervasive devices
This article explores a very relevant application area for society, considering the potential underlying Long-Range (LoRa) telecommunications equipment and devices that are currently available on the market at low cost, but with high potential
Summary
Since the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, a virus discovered in 2019 [1], one of the fundamental concerns was the elderly population, namely due to the impact that the disease caused by the new coronavirus could have on the population in this age group (65 years old or more) [2].Until several solutions for the surveillance of the elderly in a residential context had been advanced by the electronic industry, information technology and entities related to the protection of property and the security of people, allied to well-being and home automation [3,4,5,6,7,8]. The ageing population, living in remote regions, has been exposed to the cruelest conditions of abandonment, without access to medicines, without means of communication, exacerbated by the fact that, in many areas of Portugal, there is no mobile network coverage or, if there is, it has a deficient signal. For these citizens, everything became more distant. Based on this reality as a motivation for the present work, the following question arose: how can the health status and living conditions of the elderly population, dispersed in rural areas with low or no mobile network coverage at all, be remotely monitored using low-cost technologies? To answer that question, several situations need to be considered
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