Long-term remote behavioral monitoring of the elderly using sensors installed in domestic houses

In maintaining the health of elderly people, it can be useful to monitor their health status through their daily routines in their own home. This paper reports on the remote monitoring of the daily routine behavior of elderly patients in their domestic houses. We attempted to monitor the daily behavior of two elderly ladies (a 74-year-old woman and a 7 year-old woman) who live alone in Mizusawa, Japan, over a period of one year. Several sensors were installed, including infrared sensors to detect human movement, magnetic switches to detect the opening and closing of doors, wattmeters embedded in wall sockets to detect the use of household appliances, a flame detector to detect the use of a cooking stove, and a CO2 sensor to detect the presence of a subject in a room. An industrial networking system was introduced into each house to combine the sensors. The sensor outputs were recorded on a personal computer located in each house. The data were automatically transferred daily to another site via the Internet using CATV. With our system, the monitoring procedure was fully automated and did not require the placement of any sensors on the subjects or require any operations by the subjects. Information on several daily behavior patterns, such as the number of door openings, the length of sleep, absences from the house, use of a cooking stove, and the time spent watching television were clearly identifiable from the obtained data. Such monitoring techniques can contribute to maintaining the health of selected patients.