First Aid and Emergency Assistance Robot for Individuals at Home using IoT and Deep Learning

Abstract

With urbanization and societal changes, there has been an increase in the number of people living alone. This raises concern for elderly people as many mishaps or accidents can happen in a household environment when they are alone. This study proposes a smart IOT and Deep learning based robotic system to assist people, especially the elderly, in case they are alone at home. The objective is to detect anomalies and provide first aid to the victim or call emergency contacts if necessary in minimal time. The system has three stages: Distress detection, Navigation and Searching, and Assistance with feedback. The robot detects distress in form of audible screams and also monitors its surroundings frequently. Once it detects a tragic situation, it tries to detect the person in its camera frame. The robot then searches the person and attempts to get feedback from the person and tries to provide an appropriate remedy to the victim. If the victim is unconscious, it contacts emergency services. The prototype of the robot was designed and tested with three different test cases to draw conclusions and evaluate the system. To test the efficiency of the robot, three evaluation parameters are defined, they are, Robot Activation Time, Search Time, and Response Time. Since it is an emergency robot, the main objective is to minimize these parameters. Experimental results show that the robot is able to locate the victim in various scenarios in a reasonable amount of time when placed in a central location in a home environment.