Sensing Activities and Locations of Senior Citizens toward Automatic Daycare Report Generation

Abstract

Recently, as elderly people population grows, the burdens on caretakers are getting larger. In daycare centers, caretakers make a daycare report aiming to improve the senior citizen's Quality of Life. However, in the present situation, it is difficult for caretakers to record the senior citizen's activity in detail, since each caretaker needs to take care of several senior citizens at the same time. To reduce the burden of caretakers, many elderly monitoring systems have been proposed so far, but most of them are not effective in the sense that they force the senior citizen to use dedicated devices such as smart phone and/or particular applications that are obtrusive and cumbersome for care receivers. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic care-taking report generation system which can monitor movements/activity of senior citizens in daycare centers. Our proposed system estimates multiple locations (areas) where senior citizens are located with the BLE beacon, by utilizing RSSI of the Bluetooth radio wave. Also, the accelerometer implemented in the tag estimates the activity of the elderly. The information of the estimated area and activity is stored in a server with time stamp. The server generates the daycare report based on it. In order to evaluate the proposed system, we have deployed our system in a daycare center: Ikoi-no-ie 26. Evaluation result in Ikoi-no-ie 26 showed that our system estimated the subject's present area with F-measure: 80.6% and activity with F-measure: 73.8% and generated the daycare report.