There is a big future for non evasive (no video camera’s) monitoring of senior citizens with an intelligent backend that learns from the behavior and knows who to ‘call’ when the normal patterns are different.
In fact, there are some Dutch companies testing these systems at this moment.
The assisted living market is estimated to be worth £10.1 billion (2015) . Currently, the elderly population is becoming much larger within the UK and Europe, meaning that care facilities and at home carers will soon see their resources stretched if the industry doesn’t adapt.
So a big BIG future for assisted living and off course LoRa technology
I have met Adri a few times on which he showed the progress on this project.
Great to see that the market is interested and hope it will help people to stay
at home longer and feel save in the process.
an interesting development is this :
In Germany a big percentage of the homes have so called smart energy meters (like they are installing in NL to)
They generate a lot of data So they offer now the possibility to ‘watch’ a home… they know what and how the average energy consumption is during the day … when there is a change something could be wrong (diference in the normal day pattern of energy consumption) they can send an alert SMS to family or caretaker, this will be a new service and income source for energy companies. Off course all secret services have permanent access allready
example… elderly makes coffe every morning around 8… but not today —> alert send.
I wonder if the wireless technology is based on loraWAN. By moving around the sides of the cube, it seems like the sensors know what to do.
Any one has an idea of what sensors Adri is using and the appropriate lora module on what controller ?
A splendig idea which has finally been worked out and I hope the inventor wil reveal his technology.
after watching this bunch at TheThingsConference I think that monitoring water usage seems to be the best, least intrusive option to monitor general wellbeing of elderly.
We recently had to move my mother in law into a care home because, at 82, she no longer could take care of herself at home.
We did try multiple supporting technologies. It was one of my main focus areas when I started with Lora.
All failed because all were too much focused on technology and not enough on the User Experience.
Monitoring solutions detect problems;
they are hardly smart enough to prevent problems (but I have faith in AI)
The biggest impact is communication,
just try and find an email client that looks and feels like writing and sending a letter 1980s style
Mum had email and a mobile phone for years, but dementia strikes hard on ‘recently’ learned behavior.
You and I and the whole world are so focused on “smart” technology that we forget the “simple” part,
we forget the UX (oh if only Steve had made it to 70+)
Mum can now no longer make telephone calls because the care home doesn’t even have a landline.
I will happily pay 300 Euros for a T65 that operates a cell phone with 5 digit numbers.
There in lies the problem.
UX needs to comply to what one used/learned between 0 and 35 years old. [my conclusion]
That is where that Care Cube will fail for progressive dementia patients; they can’t learn anything new
So turning a cube upside down is just… turning a cube upside down… they (eventually) won’t understand the implication.
To counter the “What day is it?” problem I tried a digital clock on a 50 euro Tablet (there is a commercial solution available for 200 euro : dayclocks)
But to Mum (35 years old in 1970) clocks just do not show a date!
The paper calendar she had was fine;
so I concluded I need to add an A4 portrait monitor to display a “real” Calendar.
Alzheimer/Dementia is a weird/terrible decease (or I married into a weird family)
We have kitted out an elderly ladies home with as many LoRaWAN nodes as we could find as an experiment… Door open/close detection… Medication. Temperature & Humidity. The family love the dashboard / app we created. So far great results at the fraction of the cost of off the shelf hardware. No subscription charges to worry about either.
The Smart Senior care solution document above mentions use of LoRaWAN for SOS buttons (“Real-time reporting SOS alarm”) and for ‘fall alarm’.
If someone needs assistance to go to the toilet and uses their ‘SOS’ button for that that is fine, but for life-critical situations the LoRaWAN protocol can/should not be relied upon which to my understanding means that it should not be used for S.O.S. buttons and fall alarms.
Hi, thanks for sharing this presentation. I am interested in knowing if the Vital Sign Monitoring Mat and Care mattress are available products? Do you have a reference to concrete manufacturers?
@eivholt for bed monitoring you might want to take a look at https://www.q-strip.com/
This LoRaWAN device measures temp and humidity of a bed occupant. I’ve asked if could be used in an assisted living context and the answer is yes.
