"Canderoid": A mobile system to remotely monitor travelling status of the elderly with dementia

The number of elderly people increases quickly in many countries, under the global population aging situation. It is an upsetting fact that many elderly people are suffering from the dementia, which seriously obstructs their independent living and travel. It is a pervasive problem that the demented elderly individuals are easy to get lost or go into danger during alone travel in daily life. Therefore we propose a novel mobile system named "Canderoid" to monitor independent outdoor travel of the elderly individuals remotely, with aid from the caretaker. The system is composed mainly of an android terminal (Wanderoid), an MQTT broker, and a platform on caretaker side. In the system, an android terminal named "Wanderoid" is implemented on a smartphone to capture the travelling status, using built-in smartphone sensors (i.e. camera with an adhesive fish-eye lens, compass and GPS). The terminal device is a normal smartphone, with a fish-eye lens attached on the camera. The sensor data are transferred to the platform of caretaker after capturing. The data transmission work relies on a message pushing architecture, which deals with mobile IP address changing and enables remote manipulation of the smartphone terminal, by introducing the MQTT broker. Then the caretaker platform can interpret sensor data and real-timely present the travelling status using snapshot taken by the fish-eye camera, street view and map. A reliability test, energy dissipation test and usability test are carried out on the prototype to verify that the system is effective, easy-to-use, reliable and energy-saving, from the viewpoints of both technology and human factors.

[1]  S. Faria,et al.  Mobile web server for elderly people monitoring , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics.

[2]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  The many faces of publish/subscribe , 2003, CSUR.

[3]  Chung-Chih Lin,et al.  Wireless Health Care Service System for Elderly With Dementia , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[4]  Hichem Snoussi,et al.  A large scale and low cost solution for real-time indoor localisation based on wireless sensor network , 2011, International Workshop on Systems, Signal Processing and their Applications, WOSSPA.

[5]  Álvaro Marco,et al.  Location-based services for elderly and disabled people , 2008, Comput. Commun..

[6]  Rahim Tafazolli,et al.  uDirect: A novel approach for pervasive observation of user direction with mobile phones , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom).

[7]  Hong Linh Truong,et al.  MQTT-S — A publish/subscribe protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, 2008 3rd International Conference on Communication Systems Software and Middleware and Workshops (COMSWARE '08).

[8]  Eric R. Ziegel,et al.  System Reliability Theory: Models, Statistical Methods, and Applications , 2004, Technometrics.

[9]  P. Daly,et al.  Navstar GPS and GLONASS: Global satellite navigation systems☆ , 1991 .

[10]  H. Bakstein,et al.  Panoramic mosaicing with a 180/spl deg/ field of view lens , 2002, Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Omnidirectional Vision 2002. Held in conjunction with ECCV'02.

[11]  P. Mölsä,et al.  Long‐term survival and predictors of mortality in Alzheimer's disease and multi‐infarct dementia , 1995, Acta neurologica Scandinavica.

[12]  Phillip A. Laplante,et al.  Real-time systems design and analysis - an engineer's handbook , 1992 .

[13]  Markku Korhonen.  Mobile Augmented Teleguidance-based Safety Navigation Concept for Senior Citizens , 2012 .

[14]  Bruce Powel Douglass.  Real-Time Design Patterns , 1999 .

[15]  Marvin Rausand,et al.  System Reliability Theory: Models, Statistical Methods, and Applications , 2003 .

[16]  Jeffrey M. Voas,et al.  Mobile Application and Device Power Usage Measurements , 2012, 2012 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Security and Reliability.

[17]  Jakob Nielsen,et al.  A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems , 1993, INTERCHI.

[18]  Christophe Bobda,et al.  Camera-based system for tracking and position estimation of humans , 2010, 2010 Conference on Design and Architectures for Signal and Image Processing (DASIP).

[19]  Guo Chen,et al.  Human-Computer Interaction Design in Product Design , 2009, 2009 First International Workshop on Education Technology and Computer Science.

[20]  Shree K. Nayar.  Omnidirectional Vision , 1998, BMVC.