A residential maintenance-free long-term activity monitoring system for healthcare applications

Abstract

Demographic changes such as the ageing population and the continuous rise of chronic medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes and depression make our healthcare systems economically unsustainable. Sensing technologies are promising solutions that can provide cost-effective answers to these challenges. In this paper, we focus on long-term in-house activity monitoring that aims at early detection and prevention of such conditions. In this context, we present and experimentally evaluate an ultra low-power (less than 100- μW long-term average power consumption) on-body activity sensing prototype system that is based on Bluetooth low energy (BLE). As part of a larger smart home monitoring architecture, the role of the presented system is to collect and reliably deliver acceleration data to the upper layers of the architecture. The system evaluation incorporates a thorough power consumption study that facilitates meaningful battery lifetime estimations, an insightful coverage study in an actual residential environment, and the investigation of energy-efficient packet loss mitigation techniques.