Evaluation of Indoor Localisation and Heart Rate Evolution

The number of older adults and their proportion within the general population are expected to increase in the upcoming decades. Decision makers have turned to technology in order to provide cost-mitigating solutions. Assisstive systems have been developed for many of the challenges that can be addressed through technology. However, we find most of them to have singular focus, using proprietary equipment and communication protocols which makes them difficult to integrate into a comprehensive system. Our work was carried out in the development phase of a cyber-physical platform that enables seamless integration of third party vendor devices and applications into a configurable, extensible and cost-effective technological platform for elderly care. The present paper targets the integration of commercial off the shelf components into a real-time indoor localization system, which allows monitoring the older adult’s level of activity and detecting potentially dangerous situations automatically. We present the initial results of our comparative evaluation on the accuracy of localisation and heart rate monitoring of persons within an indoor setting. We briefly present the integrated cyber-physical system developed as part of the project. We use intelligent luminaires that act as location beacons and detail the results of an experiment where we evaluated the performance of two different luminaire types. While our previous experiments have shown that room-level localisation of a moving subject was possible using custom-developed luminaires, we extended our evaluation to cover a cost-effective, commercially available alternative. Real-time location data was combined with heart rate information recorded using a commercially available smartwatch in order to obtain a more complete picture of the monitored person’s level of activity. Our initial results showed that existing technologies can be configured and integrated into a more complex platform, which remains customizable according to each end user’s needs.