Unobtrusive mobile approach to patient location and orientation recognition for elderly care homes

The growing synergy between engineering applications and medical science has resulted in the development of effective health care services and applications responsible for higher quality of living for the world's elderly. The growing numbers of elderly demands more efficient system to monitor patients, especially those with degenerative and chronic diseases constrained to indoor healthcare environments. However, effective monitoring requires constant detection of patients' physical position and orientation, as a large proportion of in-hospital accidental deaths result from delays in responding to the physical needs of frail and elderly patients. In this paper, we propose an unobtrusive hybridized indoor approach using passive RFID sensors, biological pressure sensors, low-resolution infrared detectors and triboelectric motion detectors. The proposed system uses a two-level intelligent framework of location and orientation estimation, providing an efficient and prompt response in any emergency while giving the patients freedom to move around within their healthcare environment.