City For All Ages: Elderly-friendly City Services for Active and Healthy Ageing

Summary

Many city-dwelling elderly people can be greatly affected after a minor change in their living or health conditions. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), early dementia and frailty are among the most common risks with deep consequences on elderly's and caregivers' quality of life. Through the new wave of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city system, it is now possible to help individuals capture and make use of their personal data in a way that will help them maintain their independence for longer. The City for all Ages project will create an innovative service based on:

* ICT-enhanced early detection of risk related to frailty
* ICT-enhanced interventions that can help the elderly population to improve their daily life and also promote positive behaviour change

Through real-life pilot sites in Singapore in collaboration with TOUCH Senior Activity Centre (SAC) and the Housing Development Board (HDB), this project explores how data on individual behaviours captured through indoor and outdoor sensors could be used for the observation and detection of the following parameters:

* Activity of Daily Living (ADL): nutrition, hygiene, sleep activity
* Mobility: physical activity, going-out frequency and length
* Cognition: forgetfulness, early signs of mental decline
* Socialization: senior activity centre visits, activities attended, other places of interests visits

This 2-year project comprises of 3 phrases involving 10 healthy elderly living in HDB home in phases 1 and 2 and 100 elderly in phase 3. Our focus is to use sensing technologies installed in the elderly's home to monitor and detect their activities of daily living. Sensor data that is collected will then be analyzed to identify relevant behaviours of individuals, and to detect behavioral changes that can be correlated with risks of MCI/frailty. The appropriate ICT based interventions (e.g. data visualization and alerts to caregivers) will then be applied to mitigate these risks. Additionally, psychosocial data related to the elderly's quality of life, social activity participation and activities of daily living will also be collected via interviews and activity logs to evaluate the outcomes of our technology intervention.

Conditions

• Baseline/Control Phase
• Intervention Phase

Interventions

DEVICE

IoT sensors

The proposed assistive Activities of Daily Living (ADL) monitoring system consists of ambient infrared sensors embedded seamlessly into the living environment, and a visualization app. Multimodality sensors with wireless data transmission capability will be installed at different locations (e.g. bedroom, kitchen, toilet, bathroom, living room, etc.) to monitor and detect the activities performed by individual elderly, such as cooking, sleeping, going to the bathroom, going out of the apartment or potential wandering, bathroom falls, etc. In addition, a micro-bend fiber optic pressure sensor mat will be placed unobtrusively below the bed mattress to measure the elderly's heart and respiratory rates during sleep. This mat helps provide information on the quality of sleep and sleep-wake rhythms of the elderly with sleep disorders. The collected data will then be transferred through a secured gateway with Raspberry Pi to a dedicated server for data processing and analysis.

OTHER

Traditional/Manual elderly monitoring

Traditional elderly care without the use of IoT sensors.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Sfax

  collaborator OTHER

• National University of Singapore

  lead OTHER

Eligibility

Min Age

65 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-01-30

Primary Completion

2025-12-31

Completion

2026-01-03

Countries

• France
• Singapore

Study Locations