Smart Services for Managing Solitary Fall Death in a House of the Elderly Living Alone

Abstract

With declining birth rates and rising life expectancy, population ageing is accelerating recently. As more and more elderly people live alone, it is generating a new social question of solitary death. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an intelligent residential service designed to prevent and manage solitary fall death in the house of the elderly people who live alone. It explains an intelligence service for promptly responding to emergency situations in the stages following an accident. Through an analysis of 1,745 behavioral patterns involving thirteen solitary elderly people based on the self-administered questionnaire that proceeded in earlier studies, we have focused on kitchen, which registered the highest space usage frequency, and proposed an organization of sensors and instruments needed for the intelligent service as well as the service process. This thesis is significant in that it presents and discusses a solution to the problem of solitary fall deaths through an analysis of behavioral patterns and by using IT. Besides, its contribution consists in suggesting a method for applying IT in a house through an analysis of the behavior of solitary seniors in the house and of the indoor environment.