=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1383/paper25
|storemode=property
|title=Health and Environment Monitoring Service for Solitary Seniors
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper25.pdf
|volume=Vol-1383
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/KimLKPJ14
}}
==Health and Environment Monitoring Service for Solitary Seniors==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper25.pdf
Health and Environment Monitoring Service for Solitary Seniors
Kwangsoo Kim1, Eunju Lee1, Soonhyun Kwon1, Dong-Hwan Park1, and Seong-il Jin2,*
1 IoT Convergence Research Department, ETRI, Republic of Korea
{enoch,ieeej,kwonshzzang,dhpark}@etri.re.kr
2 Department of Computer Engineering, Chungnam National University, Republic of Korea
sijin@cnu.ac.kr
Abstract. In this paper, we propose a health and environment monitoring service for solitary seniors using
semantic web technologies (ontology modeling, semantic annotation, and ontology-based context
awareness). This service defines and logically deducts the environmental conditions which threaten the
health of the solitary seniors. This service includes solitary senior, guardian, social workers, health sensors,
environment sensors, and energy sensors. By sensing the health status and the indoor environment and
extracting events from them, this system provides more efficient welfare services for the solitary seniors.
Keywords: semantic context healthcare solitary senior sensor
1 Introduction
We live in an aging society. According to reports [1, 2, 3], Korea became an “aging society” in 2000 when
the number of seniors aged 65 or older reached 7.2% of its total population. In 2018, Korea will become an
“aged society” when the seniors comprise 14.4% of its population, and a “super-aged society” by 2027 when the
seniors comprise 21.8%. The rapid changes in demography have brought two challenges, care and support, to
seniors. Traditionally, Korean seniors have depended on their adult children for care and financial support. In
2011, the number of solitary seniors who live alone in a home comprise 19.6% of Korean seniors, senior couples
in which only the couple of old people live 48.5%, seniors living with their children 27.3%, and others 4.6%.
Specifically, the number of solitary seniors is increasing rapidly. A lot of them suffer from poverty, disease, and
loneliness because their family network is broken. Recently, a solitary senior was found two weeks later after
died. Korean government has made various policies for the care of solitary seniors. An automatic monitoring
system also is installed in the houses of solitary seniors. For example, a senior welfare center remotely monitors
the movements of solitary seniors using a passive infrared ray (PIR) sensor installed in their house. An energy
utility has developed a system to check remotely the safety of solitary seniors using the amount of power
consumption. These methods can efficiently check the safety of solitary seniors in certain ways. However, these
methods do not consider the health of solitary seniors as well as the indoor environment affecting the health of
them. Therefore, we have developed a system to provide more efficient welfare services for the solitary seniors.
2 Service Description
The left figure of Fig. 1 shows the architecture of the caring system. The system consists of a caring plug,
COMUS platform, a caring server, and an application. A caring plug is installed in a house of a solitary senior
and measures the indoor environment. The plug includes temperature, humidity, light, PIR, and noise sensor.
The PIR sensor reports the number of times the senior has moved during a day. The noise sensor reports the
noise level. The plug automatically registers itself in COMUS platform when it wakes up. COMUS platform
which we implemented as Internet of Things (IoT) platform manages all sensor nodes and includes semantic
functionalities such as ontology, semantic analyzer, semantic repository, SPARQL engine, linked open data, and
semantic translator. A caring server includes the personal information on solitary seniors and social workers,
and the business process rule to provide a welfare service. An application installed in a smartphone of a social
worker is used to send the health status of a senior to the server and receive an emergency message from.
The right figure of Fig. 1 shows the ontology representing the relations among objects. The ontology consists
of a solitary senior, a social worker, a guardian, health sensors, environment sensors, and energy sensor. A
solitary senior, a social worker, and a guardian are inherited from foaf:Person object. A social worker in the
system is a person who is appointed officially by a particular institution (e.g., a senior welfare center) to take
care of a solitary senior and a guardian is selected from relatives of a solitary senior. A solitary senior has
environment sensors and energy sensors. A social worker has health sensors. Health sensors measure the health
status of a solitary senior, which includes blood pressure, pulse, thermometer, and blood sugar. Environment
sensors measure the indoor environment of the house where a solitary senior lives in. They are temperature,
humidity, light, PIR, and noise. The energy sensor measures the amount of power which an appliance consumes.
Those sensors are inherited from resource ontology included in COMUS platform and installed in a caring plug.
Fig. 1. Architecture of Caring Service (left) and Caring Ontology (right)
A semantic annotation [4] is performed by the semantic translator using a translation rule and the caring
ontology model. To do this, the type of semantic annotation is analyzed using ontology vocabularies. The type
of a semantic annotation is used to define the translation rule for understanding the structure of creating RDF
triple pattern. The translation rule defines the method of mapping each elements of the RDF triple pattern into
the target ontology model or the value and type of the literal. A semantic processor extracts events and context
from sensing values. An event is extracted from individual sensing value and a context is extracted from one or
more events. Emergency contexts with high priority are sent to a social worker and a guardian of a solitary
senior as fast as possible. For example, an event is that the indoor temperature is too low; a context extracted
from events is that a senior is at risk to be frostbite. Fig.2 shows several user interfaces of the proposed service.
Fig. 2. User Interfaces of Caring Service
The proposed service combines the health status and the indoor environment to monitor the daily-life of
solitary seniors who do not receive care from their family. By extracting an emergency context and notifying it
to a social worker in real time, the caring service can increase the safety of solitary seniors.
Acknowledgements.
This work was supported by the Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program funded by the Ministry of
Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP, Korea) [Project No. 10038653, Development of Semantic based Open USN
Service Platform].
References.
1. Korea Economic Institute: Is Korea Ready for the Demographic Revolution? (2009)
2. Statistics Korea: Future Population-Population growth rate of each household (2010)
3. The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs: Survey of Elderly (2011)
4. Kwon, S., Park, D., Bang, H., and Park, Y.: Semantic Sleep Management service in healthcare sensor networks, IEEE
International Conference on Consumer Electronics, pp.268-269, IEEE Press (2014).