Toshio Hori, and Yoshifumi Nishida,

Abstract:
This paper introduces a pervasive sensor system for nursing homes, where daily activities of inhabitants are monitored by pervasive sensors. Deterioration in the quality of nursing care for old people has become one of the serious problems in aging societies and the authors have been challenging the problem by sensors embedded in a nursing room. The system employs an ultrasonic 3D tag system developed by the authors to record position information of the wheelchair of a subject and the information is utilized to provide prompt assistance to the subject and also to log their movement over their daily life. In our experiments, we obtained the subject's position data for a month and a half in a nursing home in Tokyo and analyzed the subject's activity transitions, the similarity between the activity and a common home schedule, and other important factors for nursing care. This paper presents the concept of the system, overview of the current system and experimental results obtained.

Keywords: ultrasonic location sensor, activity of daily living, nursing care support