PRE2017 4 Groep8

Group members

• Isabelle Cooijmans | 1014516 | i.h.m.cooijmans@student.tue.nl
• Ramon Hameleers | 0998964 | r.j.e.hameleers@student.tue.nl
• Angelique Husson | 0956648 | a.c.e.husson@student.tue.nl
• Marrit Jen Hong Li | 0963568 | m.i.jen.hong.li@student.tue.nl
• Dana de Vreede | 1020836 | d.d.vreede@student.tue.nl

Problem statement

More elderly have to live at home because there is not enough personal staff in elderly homes and the number of elderly grows every year. Moreover, there is a trend of elderly who want to live independently. However not all elderly can live independently, they depend on home care, but home care cannot keep an eye on the elderly all the time.

Objectives

Our objectives are to help the elderly to live more independently at home and to give the home care a better overview of what is going on in the house of the elderly. Moreover, to give the family more comfort about how the elderly are going.

Users

First, the primary users, which are:

• the elderly
• the home care

Secondly, the secondary users, which are:

• the family
• the friends
• the government

thirdly, the tertiary users, which are:

• the technicians

Requirements

Requirements of primary users:

• The elderly need a system that helps them to be more independent.
• The elderly need to be reminded to take their medicine.
• The elderly need to be reminded to eat when they skipped a meal.
• The elderly need to be reminded to water the plants and keep busy.
• The home care needs to get a lower work pressure and a better overview of the state of the house of elderly.

Requirements of the secondary users:

• The secondary users need their elderly to be independent.

Requirements of the tertiary users:

• The tertiary users need a system that is easy to install and easy to maintain.
• The tertiary users need a system that gives a notification in case of an error or when it needs maintenance.

Approach, milestones and deliverables

Our approach will be based on a divide and conquer strategy. We will divide the big problem into subproblems, which we will solve independently and then put them together to get the big solution. The problem is to make some kind of smart house for a home living (forgetful) elderly, which need home care. Elderly live (better?) when they take care of things and keep busy. So having plans and hence responsibility to take care of the plans. Furthermore, most elderly have to take medication. However, they can forget to take those medications in time. Moreover, some elderly sometimes forget whether they have already eaten a meal or not. Furthermore, the temperature and oxygen levels are important to keep an eye on, whether the elderly take good care of themselves. So some milestones are:

• A system that recognizes that plans need watering and a system to notify the user that the plant needs care.
• A system that registers whether the user has eaten a meal and notify the user if the skipped a meal.
• A system that measures the temperature in the house and the oxygen levels.
• A system that helps the user to be reminded that medications need to be taken.
• A system that will keep the home care up to date about what is happening in the house.

For these subsystems, we need to build prototypes and test these. But for this, we first need to investigate the state of the art. The deliverables of this project are the systems who should work together as a whole and the prototypes of these systems and hence a prototype of the whole.

Literature study

The literature study can be divided into a few subjects. First of all a broad study of smart homes.

• Architecture of small assistance device for elderly
• Monotoring and assistance system
• Source connecting people with dementia to smart homes
• Smart home for elder care using wireless sensors
• Wireless sensing network for monitoring elderly

Secondly the state of the art of medication reminders.

• (fill in source)
• Smart home medication reminder system
• Smart medicine Cabinet

Thirdly the state of the art of robots who take care of plants.

• The Pet Plant
• Low cost colour sensors for monitoring plant growth in laboratory
• Plant growth monitoring system, with dynamic user-interface
• (fill in source)

Fourthly the state of the art of robots who look at the eating of their users.

• (fill in source)

Lastly, the state of the art of thermostats and of measurements of oxygen.

• Neofox oxygen sensors: precise oxygen sensors for both liquids and gasses.
• PhO2: Smartphone based Blood Oxygen Level Measurement Systems using Near-IR and RED Wave-guided Light

Robots who take care of plants

Low cost colour sensors for monitoring plant growth

A relatively new area of research is that of non-destructive methods to measure the health status of plants. Such as looking at subtle changes in the colour of the leaves. This paper mainly focuses on low cost colour sensor for monitoring leaf colour of plant tissues.

To implement this system a autonomous robotic arm containing RGB colour, environmental and proximity sensors are used, as well as a camera. The robotic arm uses five stepper motors controlled through a motor controller and a micro-step driver. Their system was either compatible with the ColorPAI or the TCS 3200 colour sensor and both were controlled with a Basic Stamp microcontroller. The ColorPai uses a RGB LED light source and records the quantity of light reflected back from the object to determine the color. The TCS3200 illuminates the object with two white LEDs and interprets the colour of the object by producing a square wave with a frequency proportional to the light reflected by the object. A completely different way of determing plant leaf colour is by using an image captured by the camera and determining through software the colour of each pixel. This may however lead to false colour. For example when shadows from overlapping leaves are misinterpreted as colours of the leaves itself.

They only tested the TCS3200 and calibrated it across a broad range of green and yellow colours. In the end it had an average error around the 4% when determining an RGB color in the range of green and yellow colours.

Plant growth monitoring system, with dynamic user-interface

The paper develops a prototype for an efficient plant growth monitoring system. It provides data about the environmental parameters surrounding the plant and maps the changes in plant growth to the inputs given by person caring for the plants, such as the quantity of water or fertilizers. It can also measure the plants height.

The system consists of a Raspberry Pi which analysis the output of multiple sensors and sends this data via Bluetooth to someone's phone. They also developed an user-friendly app which displays all this data. The system does not take care of the plants itself, it only monitors a variety of environmental parameters

Matching technologies of home automation, robotics, assistance, geriatric telecare and telemedicine

With the increase of elderly people there is in increase in the need for home automation. This is necessary to decrease the healthcare burden which is now only getting larger. At this time most of the helping systems are stand-alone instead of working together and dependent on each other. To get a more efficient system technological integration is desired. Standalone systems for elderly care can even be more of a problem. The elderly can have problems with using multiple different interfaces. With integrated systems resources can be shared, which can’t be done with stand-alone systems. With shared systems also hardware can be used for multiple reasons, this decreases cost. Connection to a centralized host can be the solution to the problems of stand-alone systems. Howerver a centralized host could mean a decrease in robustness of the system. The use of intelligent software agents to communicate and mediate with other parts of the systems increases the efficiency of the system. This can be seen as an alternative for the centralized host and therefore avoid loss of robustness. To even further increase efficiency the communication protocol should be independent of the subsystems. A used network must also support multiple forms of communications.