Medicine management and medicine taking assistance system for supporting elderly care at home

Japan is facing two problems of aging population and declining birth rate, which lead to a scenario that the elderly are at home alone and no one takes care of them most of time. Therefore, there is need of developing the elderly care supporting systems. This paper presents a system for supporting the elderly at home in medicine management, medicine taking monitoring, and medicine taking assistance. The proposed system provides three main functionalities: (1) RFID based medicine management; (2) RFID and wireless sensors based medicine taking monitoring; and (3) situation awareness and decision-making based approach for medicine taking assistance. The system can remind an elderly to take medicine in a predicted time based on learning to know his/her habit and regular meal-taking schedule. The fuzzy theory is applied to the inference of reminding time.