WeCare: An Intelligent Badge for Elderly Danger Detection and Alert

The number of elderly or patients having chronic disease living alone are increasing in recent years. Without children´s help, they may not able to call for help by themselves when encountering health threatening conditions, like falling down or the suddenly heart attack, which may lose the best time for medical attention. This paper presents an automatic danger detecting and alerting tool for elderly or patients living alone, called We Care. It contains an easily wearable Badge and a Service Center. A cheap and energy efficient accelerometer is added to the Badge detecting 1) the falling down event, 2) the unexpected movement and motionlessness events and 3) the going out and going back home events. A GSM module is integrated to communicate with the Service Center and alerts their family members or doctors when the above events happened. By accessing the Service Center´s website, the user can configure his Badge remotely. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of our tool, which show that our tool is not only cheap and well-designed, but also customizable and with high usability.