Proposal of a remote watching system utilizing a smartphone and sensors

Abstract

There is an increasing tendency that elderly people live separately from their children or relatives with the advance of low-birth-rate, aging society and the changes in living environment. Under such circumstances, a number of systems to remotely watch vulnerable people by utilizing sensor devices and communication functions have been proposed. Existing systems to watch vulnerable people are, however, mainly aiming at health management or obtaining merely locational information of vulnerable people, and they are not able to perform a high-level observation to grasp the actual situation of those people. In this paper, we introduce a new system to remotely watch conditions of vulnerable people while they are walking or driving a car, by utilizing various types of sensors embedded in a smartphone. In our system, information obtained is periodically sent to and accumulated in the management server on the Internet, and watching people can observe their vulnerable relatives from anywhere and cope with emergency situations promptly.