VCare: A Personal Emergency Response System to Promote Safe and Independent Living Among Elders Staying by Themselves in Community or Residential Settings

Authors

Priyankar Bhattacharjee, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

Spring 5-2015

Document Type

Article

Citation

Bhattacharjee, Priyankar. (2015). VCare: A Personal Emergency Response System To Promote Safe And Independent Living Among Elders Staying By Themselves In Community Or Residential Settings, Master’s thesis submitted to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, United States.

Comments

A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Master of Science, Major: Telecommunications Engineering, Under the Supervision of Professor Tadeusz Wysocki. Lincoln, Nebraska: May, 2015

Copyright (c) 2015 Priyankar Bhattacharjee

Abstract

‘Population aging’ is a growing concern for most of us living in the twenty first century, primarily because many of us in the next few years will have a senior person to care for - spending money towards their healthcare expenditures AND/OR having to balance a full-time job with the responsibility of care-giving, travelling from another city to be with this elderly citizen who might be our parent, grand-parent or even community elders. As informal care-givers, if somehow we were able to monitor the day-to-day activities of our elderly dependents, and be alerted when wrong happens to them that would be of great help and lower the care-giving burden considerably. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can certainly help in such a scenario, with tools and techniques that ensure safe living for the individual we are caring for, and save us from a lot of worry by providing us with anytime access into their lives or activities, and as a result check their functional state. However, we should be mindful of the tactics that could be adopted by harm causers to steal data stored in these products and try to curb the associated service costs. In short, we are in need of robust, cost-effective, useful, and secure solutions to help elders in our society to ‘age gracefully’. This work is a little step taken towards that direction.

‘Population aging’ is a growing concern for most of us living in the twenty first century, primarily because many of us in the next few years will have a senior person to care for - spending money towards their healthcare expenditures AND/OR having to balance a full-time job with the responsibility of care-giving, travelling from another city to be with this elderly citizen who might be our parent, grand-parent or even community elders. As informal care-givers, if somehow we were able to monitor the day-to-day activities of our elderly dependents, and be alerted when wrong happens to them that would be of great help and lower the care-giving burden considerably. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can certainly help in such a scenario, with tools and techniques that ensure safe living for the individual we are caring for, and save us from a lot of worry by providing us with anytime access into their lives or activities, and as a result check their functional state. However, we should be mindful of the tactics that could be adopted by harm causers to steal data stored in these products and try to curb the associated service costs. In short, we are in need of robust, cost-effective, useful, and secure solutions to help elders in our society to ‘age gracefully’. This work is a little step taken towards that direction.

Advisor: Tadeusz Wysocki