Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSDescription:
With the ageing of the population and the concerns about the people’s well-being increasing, new tools need to be developed in order to allow the permanent monitoring of this demographic group. The use of smartphones by elders can be crucial in their well-being and autonomy since they are a lot of times equipped with sensors that can provide caregivers with precious indications about the caretaker current status.
Sensors can provide data about the patient’s physical activity, as well as detecting falls or calculate its position, with the help of the accelerometer, the gyroscope or the magnetic field sensor. But functionalities as these require, mandatorily, a minimum sampling frequency from the sensors that will allow the implementation of algorithms that will determine those parameters in the most exact way possible.
Having in mind that the caretakers often are not accompanied by their smartphone when they are at their home places, the creation of AAL environments with the help of some other external devices that can be ’worn’ by the patients might also become an adequate solution. These devices normally contain the same sensors as the smartphones and communicate with them through wireless technologies, like Bluetooth Low Energy.
This work evaluates the possibility of sensor frequency modification in several Operating Systems, and some modifications in the source code of some open source systems were performed. With the objective of allowing the creation of an AAL solution using an external device, profiles and services were implemented on an external device, the SensorTag.
Author: João Madureira
Type: MSc thesis
Partner: Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto
Year: 2013