DIEM Thesis: A System for Monitoring People's Home Activities

Interoperability Work Package and Department of Automation and Systems Technology of Aalto University School of Science and Technology present a new DIEM related Master of Science thesis "A System for Monitoring People's Home Activities" by Mikko Pulli.

Increasing the efficiency of elderly health care is becoming increasingly important due to the demographic change in the near future. The thesis concentrates on activity monitoring which is one way of addressing this future health care issue. A small home server is used for collecting data from wireless sensors. An activity monitoring program is designed to keep track of a person's everyday home activities. The system's design goals are ease of installation, reliability, i.e. the system works 24/7, low maintenance in terms of starting up the process after a crash or replacing batteries in sensors. A web server runs on a home server and offers a user interface to caregivers for observing the status of the person, this way reducing the workload and improving effciency.

The activity monitoring program is written in C, exploiting specific code for the ThereGate home server. The program stores data from Z-wave motion detectors and reasoning information to an SQLite database. The user interface is written in C language. The user interface program gets its information from the database, forming the web page according to a CGI query. The Web server used is lighttpd and the user interface uses JavaScript for drawing diagrams.

Preliminary test results show that the developed system is easy to install and configure. The system did not require maintenance over a two week period of operational time. It is capable of extracting some basic activities from the sensor data, such as general activity and when outside of the house. Alarm functions can be added later. The Web user interface offers multiple views into the gathered data.