Design and ergonomics of monitoring system for elderly

Abstract

This paper presents the study and the development of a tele-monitoring system with the aim to support elderly people living alone. The intent of our new system is to permanently connect the elderly with their relative and caregivers. The tele-monitoring system allows to continuously monitoring the subjects as they were in a hospital and, in case of anomalies in the health state, automatically share and alarm to caregivers and relatives. The continuous monitoring is done using two different sub-systems: wearable sensors for biomedical data collection and infrared video cameras for fall detection. The main goal of this study is to develop and test the system prototype not only from a functional point of view, but also from the user acceptability and usability point of view. For this reason this studies was based on a parallel development of acceptability and technical issues; this allows to create an ad-hoc tele-monitoring system for elderly, © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.