Energy Efficient Motion Detection of Elderly Living at Home

The issue of reducing the volume of hospital care is crucial when answering the challenge of age structure of future European populations. Increasing home care is one important, partial solution. This paper will present a home care system that will be built in our MobileCare Eastern Finland Project in 2009. The sensor system at home has 5 different sensors, a wrist alarm device, a handset and cameras. The infrared pet-excluding motion sensor reports movement events by a ZigBee radio link. Our principle includes an ultraviolet lamp in the data receiving central unit (CU) . The sensor has a semiconductor UV detector. The detection current wakes up the sensor ZigBee processor, the coded on-off-keying signature of the CU is recognised and the sending of the accumulated movement report begins. In this presentation, I describe the system, address its eye safety issues and present its energy efficiency budget. The need to replace batteries to the motion sensor is radically reduced.