A 24-hour health monitoring system in a smart house

Abstract

This paper presents a 24-hour continuous health monitoring system installed in an Intelligent Sweet Home, which is an advanced smart house developed at Human-friendly Welfare Robot System Engineering Research Center in Korea. Aiming to aid independent living of the elderly and/or people with disabilities, this system is composed of three parts: (i) a measurement device of biosignals, (ii) a monitoring system for caregivers, and (iii) client/server personal computers (PCs) for processing and archiving of history data. The measurement device measures electromyogram (EMG), electrocardiogram (ECG), body temperature, and blood pressure, and delivers the data to the client PC via Bluetooth channels. For the process, some surface-type active electrodes have been developed to measure, amplify, and filter the biosignals more clearly and conveniently. The monitoring system sends the information on health condition and security status to the caregiver’s cellular phone via a short message service (SMS) server. The caregiver only can access the system using a password and observe the situation in the Intelligent Sweet Home.