Monitoring health status of relatives — “The smoke in the chimney” approach

While in recent years much has been done to raise awareness of the challenges caused by the ageing population, in Europe and all over the world, the evolution of ICT technologies and especially the spread of embedded systems opens new possibilities in this area. Assistive applications monitoring and helping end users need to be developed. Besides their social importance, these assistive applications have great economic significance as well, creating new market opportunities and making it easier to preserve or even improve quality of life, health and social care services, at a sustainable rate of public spending. In this paper we present TeleCalmPlus, a system that tackles the above mentioned problem by using simple sensors and straightforward mechanisms to allow the unobtrusive remote monitoring of elderly people by their family members, friends, nurses, carers and doctors.