Advanced community model using daily life information transmitter for supporting welfare workers and senior citizens living alone in a welfare society

Over the last few decades, the number of senior citizens living alone in Japan has increased rapidly, to the point of dampening economic activity, increasing the load on the social security system, and decreasing the vitality of the local society. In particular, the lack of communication between a large number of elderly people and the local community has become a social problem, and such individuals are a burden on welfare workers and volunteers. With support from Kanagawa Prefectural Government, our joint research team has constructed a support system that would assist welfare workers and volunteers in serving elderly people living alone and building an active local community network. In this paper, we discuss an advanced community model based on the aforementioned information transmission welfare support system for the aging society. We also propose a system that estimates an individual´s living conditions by measuring the vibrations caused by sounds such as opening/closing of doors, flushing of the toilet, etc. Experiments revealed that this system efficiently identifies unusual/abnormal activities in households where senior citizens live alone and sends alert signals. This network model provides the necessary support to rescue workers and helps in establishing interactions between elderly citizens and their neighbors; further, it can be used to organize patrol activities.