MutualMonitor: A Tool for Elderly People to Anonymously Monitor Each Other

There has been a steady increase in the number of elderly people living alone. The isolation occurs due to children moving away from their parents house and also because of the loss of spouse or relatives. Therefore, to ensure security and comfort of the elderly, their children employ caretakers to assist and monitor them in their daily life. However, caretakers are fewer in number to the elderly people, and expensive as well. Similarly, children are too busy with their own lives to focus in regular monitoring of their parents. To tackle this situation, we present a system called MutualMonitor, which enables elderly people to monitor each other by using a mobile application. To maintain security and privacy of individuals and prevent the disclosure of any personal details, the monitoring is carried out anonymously. We collect information from 4 areas of the house: bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom, about daily activities such as cooking, sleeping, taking medicine, etc. through the use of different kinds of sensors and electricity consumption units available in the home of the elderly. A record of daily activities and their duration is generated. Similarly, notifications are sent at regular intervals to the monitoring elderly to encourage them to view the current state of the elderly. To test the effectiveness of notification in mutual monitoring, in this study we test a service application that sends regular notifications to the user. We determined the response rate and delay, and how often the user missed or ignored the notifications. We collected a total of 312 notifications from 8 users. We found that the participants dealt with an average of 6.4 notifications per day from our application, and responded to 87% of them.