Aware Group Home Enhanced by RFID Technology Motoki Miura† , Sadanori Ito†† , Ryozo Takatsuka† , and Susumu Kunifuji† † School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology {miuramo,ryozo-t,kuni}@jaist.ac.jp †† Course of Ubiquitous and Universal Information Environment, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Graduate School of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
[email protected]
Abstract. In Japan, a Group Home which offers home-based care service for elderly persons who suffer from dementia have been increased. Even though the small community of the home is suitable for familylike care, the short of caregivers increases the burden especially during midnight. To supplement the lack of attention, we developed floor mats embedded with RFID antenna and slippers with RFID tags. The system can help the caregivers to aware activities of the persons with dementia by specifying whether the person passed through the sheet on the corridor. It not only helps the caregivers to understand such persons by reviewing their activities but also keeps them informed about the person’s ongoing activities. Key words: Ubiquitous Home, Elderly Persons Care, Lifelong Computing
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Introduction
Group Home is a type of home-based care facility for the elderly persons in Japan who suffer from dementia. Since Japan is one of the fastest aging societies, developing such facilities where elderly people can live safely and at ease is crucial. In the aging society, people’s needs for care services have increased but the number of large-scale care facility is still limited. As the demands, “group home” for elderly people has increased. “Group home” is a relatively small facility based on the principle of normalization, and it offers family-like care to enrich the quality of life by respecting personalities of elderly persons. A group home is suitable for the philosophy because the size of the community. Up to nine elderly persons are taken cares by three caregivers in daytime. However in midnight, one caregiver should support all elderly persons. The caregiver is difficult to recognize concurrent events, and to memorize all behavior events occurred. To relief the burdens of the caregiver, our research group has been developing “Aware Group Home.” The concept of Aware Group Home is similar with that
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of Aware Home Research Initiative [1], but we focused on the support of caregivers living with the persons with dementia [2], and built a experimental group home named AwareRium. The AwareRium consists of built-in sensors such as ultrasonic position detectors, active RFID readers, and floor-pressure sensors. Although these advanced sensors are effective in augmenting the rooms of the group home, it is difficult to install them in real group homes. Moreover, the floor-pressure sensors can detect events such as the approach of a person in a particular area. However, it cannot distinguish the individuals, unless extra tags are attached to him/her. In order to solve the problems, we have been developing a simple RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) mat sensor system. Our system detects events approaching of a person in a specified are, and stores them for future reference or providing information to the caregiver. In this paper, we describe the system and lessons learned from our experimental results.
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RFID Mat Reader and Its Applications
In this section, we describe the system requirements, implementation of system and applications, and installing for a group home. 2.1
Requirements for System Design
For the improvement of care service based on person-centered concepts, considering individuals is necessary. Our system supports the caregivers who engage the person-centered care. Thus our system should consider individuals by identifying persons. Therefore, sensors which detect passing or moving of persons are insufficient. However, attaching personal identification devices to the elderly person’s body should be avoided. Of course, battery-powered devices increase efforts of caregivers by changing or charging the battery. In addition, we cannot fully modify the existing group homes. Because many group homes are established by minor renovation of conventional houses. By considering these requirements and our observations, we chose RFID technology to detect personal activities of elderly persons in group homes by embedding tags in slippers. The tag is enough small to embed, and elderly persons always wear slippers in the home. The passive RFID tag does not require additional treatments such as charging batteries. Thus additional tasks for maintenance are minimized for caregivers. 2.2
Use Cases
The caregivers usually assist the elderly persons by considering their ability and personality. The understanding of personal activities based on the location-aware services is advantageous to the caregivers as follows: 1. At midnight, some elderly persons frequently go to the restroom. The notification along with identification helps the caregivers to determine whether
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he/she requires assistance or not. In addition, the caregivers can find out when he/she returns from the restroom. Also the identification can be used to record a frequency of elimination for each person. When the frequency increased, the caregiver should concern his/her shortage of sleep. 2. Several persons perform inadequate activities such as brushing teeth every 10 minutes. If the system generates the activity log of a person, the patterns could be obtained, and the patterns will be helpful for considering the basic state of mind and devising countermeasures. 3. An irregular action often represents a state of high emotion. Some persons will roam around or walk down a corridor with high speed. Our system can detect these irregular actions and inform the caregivers. In addition, the caregivers have to take “care notes” to record activities. The activity log generated by our system could be used as fundamental and objective data for the note records.
Fig. 1. Our RFID antenna sheet, regulation box, and reader box
Fig. 2. Slippers with RFID tags (The tags are embedded in operation.)
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2.3
Implementation
The details of our initial prototype of RFID mat made by copper tape are described in [3]. But for reducing the effort of preparing multiple antenna sheets, we employed enamel wire sticked on a thin plastic film (Fig. 1). We prepared three types of antenna sheet in different size (300mm × 400mm, 300mm × 650mm, 300mm × 1200mm) to suit for various areas. The difference of antenna size is regulated by variable resistances in the regulating circuit box (90mm × 50mm × 26mm). RFID reader box (125mm × 80mm × 32mm) consists of an HHPA module developed by Sobal Corp.1 , a power supply circuit and a LAN module (XPort2 ). The HHPA module is compatible with ISO15693-2 tags, and can transmit 1W output. An RFID tag sheet (OMRON V720SD13P01) was embedded into slippers (Fig. 2). The reader can detect slippers within a range of 5-10 cm. Since the stride length of an elderly person is relatively shorter than ordinary person, the performance of the reader/antenna will be sufficient for group homes. We developed a simple event logger application that monitors the detection events of the RFID tags in Java. When an RFID tag is detected by an RFID reader, a data pair (tag ID, reader ID) is generated and is registered as an “enter” event. When the tag leaves the field, the event “exit” is registered. To prevent irrelevant detections or missing events, the user can set “Reader timeout” by the slider. When the reader detects an “enter” event within the timeout, the last “exit” event is canceled. As a result, the event logger stores (reader ID, tag ID, date/time entered, date/time exited) into a MySQL table. “Reader waitmsec” slider enables to set polling interval time for each reader. The “Load Readers” and “Load Users” buttons restore the descriptions of readers and tag IDs from DB tables respectively. The application also has functions to add extra readers dynamically. The function is beneficial to maintain readers with less affects on the logs. Fig. 3 shows a simple data browser for the log. The browser loads the log from MySQL table and put the person icons on a floor map of the group home. The caregiver can review the past activities of the persons by moving the knob on the slider located below the window. Thus the caregivers can follow the past events even they had engaged in other person’s care. Since the caregiver usually engages in works, he/she is difficult to watch a status window for each event. Therefore we implemented a voice announcement function. When a person who needs assistance is detected on the corridor, the system speaks “Mr. XX (owner of the slippers) is in corridor (location of the antenna mat).” This function will be effective for caregivers to know the current situation without looking at the place, especially in the case 1. explained in 2.2. The announcement function is customizable for the purpose. For example, frequency of using restroom can be informed. The voice announcement function is developed by Galatea Toolkit [4]. 1 2
http://www.sobal.co.jp/rfid/rfid-hhpa.html http://www.lantronix.jp/products/ds xport.shtml
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Fig. 3. Log Browsing Interface
Fig. 4. Activity Transition Graphs
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Also we prepared a web interface for caregivers to see the transitions of personal activities (Fig. 4). Using this view, the caregivers can notice the amount and tendency of each persons’ activity. 2.4
Installation and Operation
In order to validate the effectiveness of our system, we deployed the antennas and readers in an actual group home named Tomarigi (perch in English). Six elderly persons with dementia are living in the home. Even though the RFID mat sheet is thin (2mm thickness), putting the sheet on the floor of the common space may cause falling accidents. To prevent the falling, we put the antenna sheet under the carpet (Fig. 5). The carpet covers whole floor of the room and the corridor (Fig. 6). Fig. 3 illustrates the location of antennas in the group home. Note that the dotted round rectangles in the figure represent a dining table and two sofas. The regulation boxes are attached on the wall near the mat antenna. The RFID reader boxes are also attached on the wall below the ceiling. We connected each reader box and hub with network cables. We did not adopt wireless LAN since we found a microwave oven disturbs the network. One PC collects all data from reader by polling in every 100msec. The log browsing interface and the voice announcement function were not provided because of the experimental operation. We made tag-embedded slippers for both the elderly persons and caregivers. Seven caregivers and five elderly persons except one who used a wheelchair wore the slippers. To prevent mixed-up, we prepared various colors of slippers. We have just started the logging from January 2008. We can collects 4000 event logs (rows) per day. At this moment, they seldom lose their slippers since he/she can recognize them as personal belongings, and they carefully use without losing. We have not analyzed in terms of long-term statistics. Even though, the histogram (Fig. 7) reveals the tendency of staying long time near the dining table (reader 5 and 6) or the sofa (reader 15). Thus we confirmed that our approach to detect behaviors in RFID mat sensors is applicable for group home.
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Conclusion and Future Work
We described a design of augmented group home with RFID mat antennas to relief of caregivers’ burden. We explained the system and its applications which employ the activity data of elderly persons. By operating the systems, we confirmed that the feasibility of our approach. As future works, we continue to collect data, and provide services for caregivers as we told in this paper. Especially, we want to give some gentle tendencies which are difficult to recognize by caregivers. Based on the caregivers’ comments, we reveal the effectiveness of the logging system and the applications. The activity logs can be used not only for the improvement of daily care but also for training of novice caregivers.
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Fig. 5. Deployment of antenna in front of restroom (No. 2 antenna in Fig. 3)
Fig. 6. Deployment of antenna on corridor (before mounting RFID reader boxes)
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Fig. 7. Histogram of detected numbers of each reader/slipper
Acknowledgment The RFID technologies are presented by Sobal Corporation. Our research is partly supported by a fund from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan, under the name of “Cluster for Promotion of Science and Technology in Regional Areas.”
References 1. Cory D. Kidd, Robert J. Orr, Gregory D. Abowd, Christopher G. Atkeson, Irfan A. Essa, Blair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Mynatt, Thad E. Starner, and Wendy Newstetter. The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings (CoBuild’99), October 1999. 2. Hideaki Kanai, Toyohisa Nakada, Goshi Turuma, and Susumu Kunifuji. An awareenvironment enhanced group home: AwareRium. In International Workshop on Smart Home (IWSH2006) in conjunction with International Conference on Hybrid Information Technology, 2006. 3. Motoki Miura, Sadanori Ito, and Susumu Kunifuji. Development of RFID Mat Sensor System for Person-Centered Care in Group Home. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Knowledge, Information and Creativity Support Systems(KICSS2007), pages 59–62, November 2007. 4. Shin ichi Kawamoto, Hiroshi Shimodaira, Tsuneo Nitta, Takuya Nishimoto, Satoshi Nakamura, Katsunobu Itou, Shigeo Morishima, Tatsuo Yotsukura, Atsuhiko Kai, Akinobu Lee, Yoichi Yamashita, Takao Kobayashi, Keiichi Tokuda, Keikichi Hirose, Nobuaki Minematsu, Atsushi Yamada, Yasuharu Den, Takehito Utsuro, and Shigeki Sagayama. Open-source software for developing anthropomorphic spoken dialog agent. In Proceedings of PRICAI-02, International Workshop on Lifelike Animated Agents, pages 64–69, August 2002. http://hil.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/∼galatea/.
