Design of an IoT monitoring system for the old people at home

Resumen

Live expectancy has increased around the world. We live longer than those years before. However, even though live expectancy is larger than before, that does not mean we have increased as well our years with good health to enjoy these last years of our live. We need as society to make aware about improving life quality of these years and make sure they are not ruled by physical and mental decline.

One way of preventing this is to ensure inhabitants are aware of healthy ageing, which is promoting healthy habits such as good nutrition, be physically and mentally active. Nonetheless, although is important to maintain good habits, it is also important to develop test and factors that facilitate to predict and prevent the first signs of frailty and decline, to old with good health and better range of autonomy.

One of the most important problems at the time to develop these tests, is that they require the intervention of the geriatric professionals and caretakers to put them into action. That derives in a lot of time and, of course, great spent of money.

A solution could be home monitoring systems that are able to measure without intervention of professionals and caretakers. Along with the advantages of not having to force geriatricians to take measures, home monitoring systems can provide more regular measurements. Although they already exist some kind of sensors that can perform these tasks, such as pedometers, they lack some vital qualities, the most important, transparency and ubiquity.

ActiveUp Project was born from this necessity, to perform daily tasks during the day without noticing the different devices and sensors that can test the parameters and features of the patients.

In this document we approach the task of creating a wearable which can gather gait speed measurements and store them in an internal memory address to send them to the cloud, to allow a professional or a caretaker to observe the evolution of the patient.