Wearable Health Monitoring System for Older Adults in a Smart Home Environment

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive wearable health monitoring system for older adults in smart homes, integrating stress, blood pressure, and location monitoring to enable personalized long-term care.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated wearable system with stress detection, blood pressure estimation, and voice-assisted indoor localization for elderly care in smart homes.

Findings

Stress detection model trained with salivary cortisol data

Blood pressure estimation using PPG and regression techniques

Feasibility demonstrated through prototype and simulation

Abstract

The advent of IoT has enabled the design of connected and integrated smart health monitoring systems. These smart health monitoring systems could be realized in a smart home context to render long-term care to the elderly population. In this paper, we present the design of a wearable health monitoring system suitable for older adults in a smart home context. The proposed system offers solutions to monitor the stress, blood pressure, and location of an individual within a smart home environment. The stress detection model proposed in this work uses Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Photoplethysmogram (PPG), and Skin Temperature (ST) sensors embedded in a smart wristband for detecting physiological stress. The stress detection model is trained and tested using stress labels obtained from salivary cortisol which is a clinically established biomarker for physiological stress. A voice-based prototype is also implemented and the feasibility of the proposed system for integration in a smart home environment is analyzed by simulating a data acquisition and streaming scenario. We have also proposed a blood pressure estimation model using PPG signal and advanced regression techniques for integration with the stress detection model in the wearable health monitoring system. Finally, the design of a voice-assisted indoor location system is proposed for integration with the proposed system within a smart home environment. The proposed wearable health monitoring system is an important direction to realize a smart home environment with extensive diagnostic capabilities so that such a system could be useful for rendering long-term and personalized care to the aging population in the comfort of their home.