Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
cooker. If an elderly has forgotten to turn off the cooker, a care-giver will be able to view the
current status displayed on the portal when logging in. For instance, on the service page on
the portal, it will be displayed if an elderly has “started cooking”, “cooking on” or “not
cooking” and the last time when this event took place will also be illustrated. If for instance
the cooker has been on for a while or for too long, the system will send the information
containing an alert message (email/sms) to the care-giver. At the same time, at elderly's
home, a voice message will be played to the elderly person from the Carebox, and a blinking
message will turn up on the top part of the Carebox screen to warn him/her about the
forgotten activity. The duration for cooking before receiving an alert is to be adjusted
depending on the “life style pattern” of the specific elderly person. For example, the time for
the duration of a cooker being turned on for a while can be adjusted before it is to trigger an
alarm to care-givers. The voice and text message for cooking for a while is a prompt for the
elderly to react, defined as first level reaction. Then if the system detects that there is no
response from the elderly, an alarm could be sent to care-giver for example that the cooker
has not been turned off for more than a pre-defined period of time - this is characterised as
the second level reaction. All these events, communicated as cooker on, cooker off, message
for cooking for a while or for too long, are posted on the message board on the web portal
for overview purpose of the daily activities. The workflow for this service is depicted on
Figure 2 below.
Depending on the preferences of the regional care provider and the family care-givers, the
cooking monitoring service can work with either one of the three installations - one
temperature sensor, with two temperature sensors or with a power relay. In case of two
temperature sensors, a threshold for temperature difference can be adjusted from the web
portal.
3.1.2 Smoke/fire detection service
The purpose of the smoke/fire alarm is to send information for smoke or fire alarm to the
web portal. Furthermore, the system notifies the elderly person on the Carebox about the
dangerous situation. At the same time it notifies the caregivers by SMS or email. If care-
giver accesses this service, a care-giver can see if a fire alarm is in progress, the last time
when a fire alarm may have occurred, and if so, the care-giver can view the time when it
ended (i.e. it was reset). All these events are posted on the web portal in the list with recent
events so the care-giver can see them. If there is event “smoke/fire alarm ON”, at the same
time the system shows a blinking message on the top line of the Carebox and is “telling” to
the elderly person that there is smoke/fire detected in the home and he/she needs to react.
This notification is repeated periodically on the Carebox until the event “smoke/fire alarm
OFF” is detected by the system. Improvement suggested during the real-life pilot operation
for the smoke/fire alarm service was to send one additional SMS - initially the service was
designed to send one SMS in case of “alarm on” event but there was a need for similar
notification SMS for “alarm off” event and this was implemented. This was needed because
of some cases with false alarms during the test period and also due to the fact that very often
more than one relative receives SMS alarms but depending on their agreement, one is to
react in case of incident. The second SMS was to inform all of them that there is no more
danger.
