AN INTELLIGENT ELDERLY HEALTHCARE MONITORING SYSTEM USING FIBER-BASED SENSORS

It is common to see elderly people requiring round-the-clock care from caregivers due to declines in physical and mental abilities. Elderly people who are frail and disabled spend most of their time in bed. In this paper, we present a smart Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) monitoring system in which the FBG sensors are embedded into the bed. The optical sensor system will allow safe long term continuous monitoring of elderly people's vital signs such as respiration and heart rate, monitoring of posture and movement and bed occupancy status. Use of FBG sensors offers many advantages over conventional electrical sensors, such as being passive, immune to EMI, able to multiplex, etc. But the negative side is the cost of the optical interrogator system. To create a cost-effective solution for institutions, we try to support multiple beds using a single optical interrogator. This paper presents a multi-bed monitoring system and the algorithms used for adding intelligence to the system calculation of pulse, respiration rates, pressure distribution plots and detection of bed occupancy. The system is designed for real deployment and trial in hospitals and the algorithms have been chosen to support an easy deployment.