DOI: 10.5176/2251-3833_GHC13.39
Authors: Tim D. Hunt, Dileep Rajendran, Mark Nikora and Susan Bennett
Abstract:
Many countries are facing an aging population and are looking for solutions to the problem of providing affordable care services. One of the first countries to face this challenge is Japan and their industry has embraced the development of a range of technology solutions. Unfortunately much of the technology being developed is likely to be unaffordable to many citizens. A parallel development underway in many parts of the world is the focus on energy efficiency with many low cost meters aimed at the residential market available. The data that is collected by these meters is likely to be a proxy for the health of single occupant residences and thus offers a potential low cost solution to the monitoring the elderly and disabled. A third major development currently underway is the rise of so called cloud computing services. This is the last piece to the puzzle as it is now possible to easily and cheaply deploy ‘always on’ applications that can monitor the electricity data and make intelligent decisions to alert those that need to know the status of the elderly. This work demonstrates the implementation of such a service using currently available ‘off-the-shelf’ technologies.
Keywords: power, electricity, well being, alerts, monitoring, elderly, disabled, assistive technology, independent living, assistive living
Updating...