Using LPWAN Connectivity for Elderly Activity Monitoring in Smartcity Scenarios

Abstract

Home care is an increasing research area; an example is the interest in daily activity and mobility tracking, known to be a strong indicator for people’s health. In particular, the digital mobility assessment of elderly can anticipate and prevent hard clinical events such as falls, that could result in hospitalizations and deaths. In this work, the use of LoRaWAN is verified in a real-world scenario as an effective communication infrastructure for transmitting activity level information to a supervisor structure like a clinic or a hospital. An experimental setup has been purposely implemented to evaluate the feasibility; in particular, the activity level inferred analyzing accelerometers data can be notified with an average delay in the order of 500 ms.