13-02-2013, 12:47 PM
Daily Life Activity Tracking Application for Smart Homes using Android Smartphone
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Abstract
Smart home is regarded as an independent healthy
living for elderly person. Advances in phone technology and new
style of computing paradigm (i.e., cloud computing) permits real
time acquisition, processing, and tracking of activities in smart
home. In this paper, we develop android smartphone application
to assists elderly people for independent living in their own
homes. It reduces the health expenditures and burden of health
care professionals in care facility units. We assume smart home
as an intelligent agent to perceive the environment and process
the sensory data on cloud. Smartphone application
communicates with cloud through web services and assists the
elderly person to complete their daily life activities. It facilitates
the care giver assistant by tracking the elderly persons in their
own homes and avoids certain accidents. Furthermore, it also
helps the family members to track the activities, when they outside from homes.
INTRODUCTION
The emerging demographic change towards an ageing
population is introducing drastic changes into our society.
Nursing homes and care facility units are renowned solution
for elderly people. A person who lives in these units
becomes depress due to lack of independence. Aging society
demands a reliable solution to stay active for a long time,
prevent social isolation and assistance for performing daily
life activities independently in their own homes. The
advancement in wireless and ubiquitous technologies offers a
unique opportunity to create pervasive environment and
applications to support elderly people. Smart home is
conceived as one strategy to provide a level of independence
at homes and improve their quality of life [1]. It provides a
platform to reduce the health expenditures and burden of
health care professionals.
In both developed and developing countries, numbers of
smartphone users are increasing day by day. For example,
there are more than 16 million smart phones owned by
Koreans and 100% of the population has access to a mobile
phone network. Smartphone runs a complete operating system
and provides a platform for application developers and users.
Google Android is one of the most competitive markets due to
its open source platform. Hundreds of applications have been
developed ranging from the interactive games to healthcare
domain. Especially the medical domain applications enable
the users to interact with the system to provide real time user
assistance and help to improve the people life’s style [2].
To take the advantage of assistive technologies in smart
home and smartphone, we develop a daily life activity
tracking application for the wellness of ageing society and
care givers.
RELATED WORK
A large number of smart homes have been developed as a
physical testbed to support the elderly society. Chowdhury et
al. [3] developed a RFID-based hospital real-time patient
management system. They developed the system by following
Agile System Development Methodology (ASDM) using C#
in Microsoft Visual Studio.net 2003 environment. It facilitates
automatic streaming patient identification in hospitals with the
help of mobile devices like PDA and smart phones.
The Harvard University research project, CodeBlue [4],
deploy low-power wireless devices to provide ad hoc sensor
network infrastructure for emergency medical care. They
developed patient triage application in .NET compact
framework, running on an iPAQ PDA with Windows CE. The
application is capable of operating as active tags to store the
information of a patient’s identity, status, and history.
ISBN 978-89-5519-163-9 241 Feb. 19~22, 2012 ICACT2012
Oresko et al. [5] implemented a prototype system for
wearable Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) detection on
Windows smartphone. It is capable of performing real-time
ECG acquisition and display, feature extraction, and beat
classification. They developed two smartphone-based
platforms for continuous monitoring and recording of a
patient’s ECG signals. Application successfully detects realtime
CVD and generates personalized cardiac health summary
reports.
PROPOSED ACTIVITY TRACKING ARCHITECTURE
We investigate the requirements in terms of communication,
storage, processing and smart phone development platform to
make it an acceptable solution. The proposed architecture of
activity tracking application is illustrated in Figure 1. It is
divided into three layers smart home, cloud computing and
application layer.
A. Smart Home Layer
Smart home is ubiquitous sensing technology to recognize
and track the daily life activities of inhabitants. Sensors are
deployed on different objects and locations to sense the
environment. It periodically sends the collected data to the
server. For its processing, many machine learning and
probabilistic models are developed for recognize the daily life
activities [8] [9].
In proposed architecture, smart home is viewed as an
intelligent agent that perceives its environment through
different kind of sensors. We deployed RFID Tags,
Biosensors, Micaz and Masol 1 on different objects and
locations to track inhabitant’s daily routines.
IMPLEMENTATIONS
We developed the android smartphone application in open
source development tool Eclipse Ganymede JDK 6 with
standard android platform 1.6 and API level 4. Application is
synchronized with cloud server through web services. An API
ksoap2 (Simple Object Access protocol) is utilized for
communication between application and web services. It is an
open source API that provides a lightweight and efficient
SOAP library for the communication to android platform
applications.
Our system deployment in uLCRC (u-Life Care Research
Center) is shown in Figure 2. It comprise of three main sites,
namely smart home, hospital and office environment. The
smart home includes a kitchen, a bed-room, a living room and
rest room.
CONCLUSIONS
To provide mobility for tracking the daily life activities,
smartphone is a convenient and suitable device due to its rich
functionalities. In this paper, we have utilized the smart phone,
smart home, and cloud computing services that may help to
reduce the demands on elder’s attentions and effort while
performing daily life activities. It generates separate alerts for
incomplete critical, stable, scheduled and overlooks activities
for elderly persons. List of subscribed elderly persons, their
last completed activities and alerts for critical situations are
generated for care givers and family members. It reduces the
health expenditures and burden of health care professionals.
Our application is well integrated with smart home
environment and hospital infrastructure.