IOT Enabled Non Contact Health Monitor Concept

Other day I was thinking about my aging mom. She stays alone at my hometown. The only way I can learn about her health is by calling her at least once a day and interacting with her.

That's when I came up with this concept.

Mind that this concept is huge for my capability to execute. So just publishing it here if anybody can make use of it.

I am planning to make some part of it, but that will be a very customized one.

Many septuagenarian today stay alone with working kids who stay away from them due to requirement for careers. They can't meet the parents for moths together. Just connect over the phone and all.

Not to say it loud, kids have concerns for their parent's health and what they do all day to maintain a good health.

Many health monitors are available in the market which can watch over senior citizen's health, but they are more of intrusive kinds with monitoring kits to be worn at all times. This is one thing that the old people don't like at all.

The sensors that arduino and esp kits have are quite extensive and can be calibrated for various tasks.

This is the design of the health monitor system. The sensors mentioned in the image does not interfere in any way with the physical movement of people.

Following are the sensors:

Motion Sensors

Proximity Sensors

Weight Sensors

Tilt Sensors

Non Contact Temperature Sensors

Pulse Sensors

Appliance operation Sensors

The usability of these sensors are discussed in more detail in the following steps.

Motion Sensors: Motion sensors can be used to track the movement of the person within the house.

Other than this, an alert can be generated if there is count of movement in the house is more than the total persons (burglar alert)

Also if there is no movement within the house then also an alert can be generated and the family member can take a call if it is a false alarm or not.

Proximity Sensors: Proximity sensors can be used with the motion sensors to fine tune the movement behavior of the person in question.

Weight Sensors: These sensors attached to the medicine bottles can be used to raise a reorder alert for the family member for purchasing the medicines before they are empty.

Tilt Sensors: These can be used to check for water intake of the person which is a concern for aged people.

Non Contact Temperature Sensors: These sensors use IR for checking the body temperature of a human. For implementing these sensors we have to check for recurring behaviors such as sitting on a particular chair or relaxing on a particular spot. The system can raise an alert if the temperature passes a threshold which can be calibrated.

Pulse Sensors: These can be used as passive sensors for keeping historical data for doctor's reference.

Appliance operation Sensors: This sensor are useful for people who tend to forget about running appliances such as bath tub water, geyser, cooking devices etc.

There are various micro controller boards available in the market that can be used as the controller. For a hobby prospect mostly these boards can be used.

arduino (with wifi and other sheilds)

esp8266 (self contained wifi)

raspberry pi (self contained wifi)

Many other equivalent boards are available in the market. This will depend on the users requirement and ease of usability.

Atmel chips are also possible to use straight away. But those are little advanced to handle for starters considering they require various active and passive external components to be useful.

Data server is the most important part of the project as it will be used heavily for storing all the data from the sensors and also server the final viewer of the data in a display mode.

Also the data server will require for summarization and pruning for older data because due to regular data storage, the memory will be used up pretty fast. This of course depends on the storage capacity that you will be using considering storage on the open network is costly.

Data will be stored int he data server through secured API calls which will be password protected. Encryption of data can also be used considering you are making it more secure, but that will require overhead in coding.

The web server is the one which takes the data from the data server and moderates it into viewable data for the family members, doctors and others with secured access.

Considering the viewing is for various devices. Various code versions are to be incorporated into the web server. The developer may also chose to use various free or opensource templates available in the market as the various devices have already be incorporated into it.

How to display the data depends on the user who is developing the system. Creating User Experience is a must for these systems.

Alerts are important for these kind of systems as to keep a monitor on the person.

These systems are inevitable in today's world as people are moving away from each other. Families are becoming nuclear. And parents don't like to stay in the cities where their kids are working. But as kids we are concerned about our parents health.