Assisted Living and Residential Monitoring
This project is still in prototype phase.
An aging baby-boom generation is stressing the U. S. healthcare system, causing hospitals and other medical caregivers to look for ways to reduce costs while maintaining quality of care. It is economically and socially beneficial to reduce the burden of hospital and provide more support for assisted living. This requires a long-term shift from a centralized, expert-driven, crisis-care model to one that permeates personal living spaces and involves informal caregivers, such as family, friends, and community.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide capabilities that are valuable for continuous, remote monitoring, as research into military and environmental systems attest. For healthcare applications, they can be deployed inexpensively in existing structures without IT infrastructure. Data are collected automatically, enabling daily care and longitudinal medical monitoring and diagnosis. The wireless devices can integrate with a wide variety of environmental and medical sensors.
Some the planned features are:
- An extensible, heterogeneous network middleware that addresses the challenges of an ad hoc wide-scale deployment, and integrates embedded devices, back-end systems, online analysis, and user interfaces
- Novel context-aware protocols using two-way network information flow: environmental, system, and resident data flow into the back-end, and circadian activity rhythm analysis feeds back into the system to enable smart power management and dynamic alert-driven privacy tailored to an individual's activity patterns
- A query protocol for efficiently streaming online sensor data to the system and to users, integrated with privacy, power management, and activity analysis.