A Channel Hopping LoRa Technology Based Emergency Communication System for Elderly People Living Alone

Nowadays, as more and more senior citizens have retired and lived alone at home, the population aging issue is becoming serious. For this elderly group, their health and safety deserve more attention. In this paper, we design an emergency communication system to facilitate the health and safety monitoring of the elderly people living alone. The system consists of both hardware and software parts. The hardware part includes Raspberry Pi, sensors and LoRa modules. Among them, Raspberry Pi 4B+ is the core control board, and the Sense-Hat is an integrated board of sensors to collect relevant data. The LoRa modules are used to transmit data between the terminal and the gateway. The software part includes communication protocol, channel hopping strategy, fall detection algorithm and WeChat applet. Among them, the communication protocol combined with the channel hopping strategy can improve the quality and efficiency of communication between the gateway and the terminals, and the fall detection algorithm can monitor in real-time whether elderly people are incurring falling danger. Once a fall occurs, a warning message will be reported to the gateway, and then reported to the OneNet cloud platform and WeChat applet, so that the family members (say, sons or daughters) who are far away from home can know the situation of the elderly people at home. The system is helpful to realize remote nursing of the elderly people living alone.