Case study: Long-term Experiments on a Daily Activity: Monitoring System for an Elderly Living Alone

This paper describes analysis of long-term experiments on a monitoring system to assess the daily activities of the elderly who live alone. The developed system is composed of an in-house sensing system and a server system. The in-house sensing system installed in their own houses is a typical wireless sensor network system including three kinds of wireless sensors. The server system has a database server and an assessment server. We have installed the system into an elderly house, collected data during over two years continuously, then analyze the data. From the analysis, we could measure the energy consumption profile of three kinds of sensor nodes. The experiment shows all kinds of nodes can operate over one year with two AA-size alkaline batteries. Using a measure of reliability of the monitoring system called 'deadzone', the system has showed the failure operation for 842 hours (4.66 %) during over 18,000 hours total operation period. © ICROS 2012.