Prototyping and evaluating a wireless sensor network for easy installation

Abstract

The number of senior citizens living alone are increasing in Japan. Accordingly, the budget for social security is increasing. The percentage of burden for social security budgets reached 69.5% only for senior citizens recently, and will increase more and more. These budgets are consumed in mainly in the larger hospitals. Thus, recently "in-house" health care for senior citizens is gathering much attention in Japan. Various "home-care" products are increasingly developed and implemented to care the health of the senior citizens. However, these products are usually expensive and their self installation is very difficult. In this research, we developed a wireless sensor network system that realizes easy installation and easy operation. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate that our system can surely find some anomaly sensing information without any difficult installation procedures.