Enabling Low Cost Elderly Monitoring for Connected Communities in Depopulated Area

Abstract

By introducing the state of the art sensing technologies to the home, monitoring the daily activities of elders living alone or with husband/wife only, will be common soon to support their life from remote sites. We have developed a portable monitoring system to estimate daily activities just using simple, low-cost binary sensors and power monitors using MLN (Markov Logic Network), and installed in real elders' homes for monitoring. However, such monitoring systems usually require the Internet connection, which is not often available in depopulated areas due to the blind zone of 3G/LTE or installation cost which incurs extra investment for those people who have no interest in Internet services. In this paper, we propose a method of collecting daily activity monitoring data, which is obtained by our monitoring system working standalone at home, via LPWA (Low Power Wide Area). The idea is to utilize vehicles such as community buses and mail trucks which drive daily along almost fixed routes. An LPWA onboard receiver is mounted to collect data from each LPWA transmitter embedded into our monitoring system at home. Since not all the houses may be covered by the LPWA, LPWA-based "house clusters" are automatically formed to deliver the data in the cluster via a home contacted by the receiver vehicle. We have tested the system prototype in our university campus and installed it to the five real houses in the mountainous areas in cooperation with the Toyooka city municipal government, which has to manage broad depopulated areas.