Implementation and Layout Optimization of Motion Sensor for Anomaly Detection in Daily Life of Elderly Persons

Abstract

The increasingly aged society is one of most critical issues facing developed countries. An especially important issue is elderly care in rural areas, which has become a much greater challenge to meet due to large numbers of young people migrating to urban areas. Furthermore, in these rural areas, it is difficult for care workers to frequently visit the homes of the elderly. In addition to the problems of implementing monitoring systems, there is usually no mobile internet deployment, frequent servicing by engineers is difficult, and the elderly cannot check or maintain the systems themselves. For this reason, we propose a monitoring system model that contains motion sensors and a sensor network using LoRa communication. LoRa communication enables us to implement a sensor network economically and energy-effectively. We implement an energy-effective sensor device using only a passive infrared sensor, a microcontroller, and the LoRa comm module. In experiments, we conducted data sampling in several rooms of a participant's house. The data are the number of times that the resident appears in front of a sensor device. We confirmed that the living room and bedroom were frequently used in daily routines and that the obtained values differed according to the time. Furthermore, we also confirmed that the sensor device placed in the restroom could be expected to detect health anomalies that are reflected in the number of usages of the restroom.