Elderly monitoring system in a smart city environment using LoRa and MQTT

Abstract

With the rapid surge of M-Health and smart city systems, the need to accommodate sensors and actuators to achieve effective automation turns out to be imposed, for an efficient machine-to-machine communication to be maintained. In this regard, the key elements necessary for a successful M-Health system to take place are discovered to be the power consumption and interoperability maintaining factors. In this context, the present study is conducted to devise a special elderly tracking and monitoring system, closely connected to a walking stick device. The proposed design involves a cane cased transmitter node, enabling to send data related to the position and the state of the elderly to a base station, through implementation of the LoRa technology. The latter would then apply the message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol to interact with the environment once a fall proves to take place. For the purpose of evaluating the advanced design associated coverage range and power consumption rate, as enhanced via LoRa network, several experimental tests have been administered. The achieved results appear to reveal that the suggested architecture recorded average covered area turns out to be of the rate of 6 km2