Designing a sensor-based monitoring system for a health care center

[[abstract]]Taiwan is an aging society, and the elder population will continue to grow at an increasingly faster rate relative to its younger cohorts. With the advancement of medical technologies and improvements in medical facilities, hygiene and basic living standards, the aging population will also face increasingly longer life expectancies. As a result, elder care is an enormous social burden and a critical area of future research and technological development. This paper describes a potential application of ZigBee the latest wireless sensor network technology, to a communication system that tracks an elder person’s physical movement within a freely moveable space such as an elder care facility. The communication system is composed of three parts: a ZigBee node that transmits signals regarding movements of the elder person, a control and management platform based within a mobile device, and a website that serves as the caretaker interface. The application of ZigBee to elder care provides numerous advantages because of many of ZigBee’s desirable features: short range, low power, low data rate, simple communication protocol, low cost, and small footprints. In light of the aging population and growing need for better and more cost-effective elder care in Taiwan, the communication system described in this paper is a promising application of ZigBee because it provides a convenient and efficient mechanism for nurses within an elder care facility to stay actively informed about elder residents