Smart notification system for nursing homes

Abstract

The rapid rise in ageing population and number of elderly people living alone necessitates an improved approach to existing elderly care services. The current approaches taken to alleviate this situation involves setting up more nursing homes, as well as increasing housing capacity of the existing homes to handle the increasing demands. However, failure in providing the adequate amount of manpower resource has resulted in increased workload for caregivers with many facing the risk of being overworked. In recent years, many information technology solutions have been deployed to address this issue of overworked caregivers. Firstly, robots with capabilities of performing the work of a human caregiver were built to reduce the dependency of humans in the caregiving role. Secondly, various works specific to facilitating the day-to-day duty were also implemented. However, these technological solutions have their own set of limitations. Firstly, some of the proposed works do not directly solve the problems faced by human caregivers in their day-to-day duty and even if it does, they are too costly to implement. Secondly, most systems disregarded the need for stakeholders to visualize the implemented algorithm functionality, thus making it difficult for them to judge if the desired effect was achieved. To address these limitations, this project aims to utilize location data generated by Bluetooth Beacons in creating a low-cost system to facilitate a caregiver’s day-to-day duty. In addition, a simulation feature was added, enabling visualization of the implemented algorithm. Information was also gathered from the simulation performed to support stakeholders in their decision making. Future works for this project include extending the scope of the system to fit in more realistic simulations and to make modifications to the implemented algorithm to better suit the objectives.