Smart home for elderly care, based on Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

The population of elder people is growing rapidly and these days many of them have to stay alone, independently instead of old age homes. With increasing age, people tend to forget things which may create safety problems for them. In this paper, it is proposed to develop a Wireless Sensor Network based smart home system for such elder people to help them ease their work and provide them safe, sound and secure living. A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is comprised of a large number of sensor nodes that are deployed in an unattended and remote environment to measure a few physiological parameters. The recent development in WSNs is the concept of Smart Homes. Smart homes integrate many devices that can sense the required parameters and control the characteristics of the home. The great progress in the industry standards and installation of lightweight wireless networking hardware over a period of time has proved ZigBee to be well suited for Smart homes and automation systems. ZigBee is a low cost, low power, less complex wireless standard. In this paper, sensors like temperature sensor, LPG sensor, Contact sensor are proposed to be deployed for fire detection, gas leakage detection and determination of whether any door is closed or open, respectively. LabVIEW is used as a graphical user interface. In case of any emergency, a warning message will be generated, and played through a loudspeaker for the user to take notice of the same and an SMS will be sent to the caregiver using GSM modem to take preventive action.