DEVELOPMENT OF IOT-BASED HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

In the present era of globalization, the growth of an elderly and those who live alone have been increasing over the years. In Malaysia, the total population of elderly citizen increases from 8.2% in 2012 to 8.6% in 2013. By 2030, Malaysia is expected to be in category of ageing nations with elderly citizen constituting more than 15% of the population, approximating to 4.66 million of Malaysians. Most of the elderly nowadays experiences chronic diseases and health care problems due to the disconnection with their children or relatives. The focus of this paper is to design an IoT-based (Internet of Things) Healthcare System for elderly people where they can monitor their health care status without concern of their family members. This healthcare system compromise with various sensors embed in wearable devices and surrounding home. The aim for this healthcare system is to detect any abnormalities that will occur and monitoring the elderly activities in living environment. The main central system will be also provided at home where the elderly will be reminded to take their medicine, give health advises, and even call for help if elderly is in emergency. This healthcare system will be connected to family members, care takers and responsible doctors with IoT technology. The elderly’s healthcare data will be collected and stored in Cloud Computing where it is able to provide real time information for family members and care takers through the development of web server and mobile applications. This proposed healthcare system is tested using two different test; preliminary testing and field testing. The preliminary testing is conducted to ensure that the sensors are accurate in measuring the data before conducting the field testing. The field testing is tested at old folk’s home in Seri Iskandar on random elderly with different ages and medical information. The data of the elderly is observed and analysed. The accuracy of the data collected is determined using the standard error of mean (SEM) and root-mean-square error (RMSE). From the analysis, the smallest SEM is 0.13 and the highest SEM is 3.51, which is still small thus proves the small variation of the data to the population mean. The smallest RMSE is 0.24 and the highest RMSE is 3.39, which is still small thus proves the high accuracy of the sensor data to the clinical device. This IoT-based Healthcare System for Elderly Citizen could increase the performance and lower the healthcare problem of an elderly citizen while improving the comfort, safety and daily routines of an elderly life.