A Smart Home Environment to Support Risk Monitoring for the Elderly Living Independently

Abstract

Elderly people prefer to live independently despite being vulnerable to age-related challenges. Constant monitoring is required in cases where the elderly are living alone. The home environment can be a dangerous environment for the elderly due to adverse events that can occur at any time. The potential risks for the elderly living independently can be categorised as injury in the home, home environmental risks, and inactivity due to unconsciousness. The aim of this paper is to discuss the development of a low-cost Smart Home Environment (SHE) that can support risk and safety monitoring for the elderly living independently. An unobtrusive and low cost SHE prototype that uses a Raspberry Pi 3 model B, a Microsoft Kinect Sensor and an Aeotec 4-in-1 Multisensor was designed and implemented. An experimental evaluation was conducted to determine the accuracy with which the prototype SHE detected abnormal events. The results show that the prototype has a mean accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 94%, 96.92% and 88.93% respectively. The sensitivity shows that the chance of the prototype missing a risk situation is 3.08%, and the specificity shows that the chance of incorrectly classifying a non-risk situation is 11.07%.

Keywords

• Ambient Assisted Living
• Ambient Intelligence
• Context-Awareness
• Elderly
• Remote monitoring
• Smart Home Environment