Senior citizens can bank on technology to stay safe

We are all getting old and with age comes maturity and wider thinking appreciating the meaning of life. Our ancestors were aware of ageing, and understood that it is a natural process which takes us through a variety of experiences. These experiences made them come up with a joint family concept. They had experimented and evolved the joint family system to ensure safety of the aged members. They built systems around undivided family of life style as a way of living. The age-old joint family system had been instrumental in safeguarding the physical, social and economic security of the elders. 

There are changes which have emerged in our lifestyle, leading to creation of nuclear families located in different geographical locations. Everybody wants to remain independent as one ages. At times, it is the independence they are so used to, and the inability to accommodate change, that causes the split. At times it is due to their children who live abroad. I have come across incidents where senior citizens — husband about 80+ years and wife about 75+ years —are living alone, while their son and daughters with their families are in different parts of the world with phone and Skype calls as the medium of communication. This life style transformation represents both challenges and opportunities.

Living alone can be difficult, if not dangerous, for seniors with declining cognitive abilities. Current Indian generation accepts and permits such social experiments due to emerging, lifestyle alterations and still stick to their roots in terms of watching on their elders and their well-being wherever they are. When senior family members live by themselves, we talk to them every day or alternative days over phone and in case there is no answer we request the nearby relatives and / or friends to visit them. Thus immediate care management often falls on nearby friends and or relatives. 

However, thanks to technology, there are numerous solutions to provide watchful freedom to the aged. This includes installation of a variety of security camera systems, and burglar alarm systems. Changes in technology has enlarged the market for home monitoring systems, and the Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS) across the globe. PERS have started catering to the elderly. 

PERS is being rebuilt around the emerging technological capabilities of Internet of things (IoT) manifested as wearable for human welfare and big data. A wearable, currently is a gadget which is waterproof, and worn by the individual either as a pendant, or a watch or in some other simple form. Such systems are used to monitor and help the individual’s health, well-being and safety. Aged members use wearables’ to trigger emergencies with a click of a single button. It is the senior individual who triggers the button to alert connected relatives. The individual’s at the same time, enjoy their independence and are still within the electronic reach of their relatives and well-wishers. 

There are various types of situations, emergencies and natural causes where the button may not be pressed on time. One cannot always expect the elders to press the button due to other reasons. This is where automated button triggers are of help. At times it is the lack of action from elders which triggers the button. At others, it is a sudden fall of the elderly person which triggers the button. I remember incidents where the senior citizen was at a bus stand and in his anxiety to board, he fell down on the pavement leading to hospitalisation. There was another incident where the senior citizen was doing his morning walk in the park, who sat down on a bench and became unconscious for more than an hour. A senior citizen who was walking towards the vegetable market had slipped into the rain water drain, leading to injuries and hospitalisation. The button may also get triggered due to health reasons. I remember another incident where a senior citizen had suddenly developed a fear of falling and was unable to get up and open the door leading to hospitalisation. There are innumerable such senior citizen- related incidents being reported every day. Such incidents can be addressed with the help of personal emergency response system. 

PERS is primarily a button press event to highlight an emergency situation and hence there is no big learning curve for implementation. The button generates an emergency event alarm when pressed. The generated signal is connected to a centralised monitoring station through a carrier. The signal is carried by the mobile carrier or local wireless access point, connected to internet, depending on the connection methods. The signal received in the centralised monitoring station is mapped to the (senior citizen) customer and the individual is identified with an address mapped to signal tower coordinates. If the individual is not in the defined address (tower coordinates) and the signal is received from a different coordinate, the new coordinate is mapped to the individual for emergency needs. The registered event is designed to trigger alerts to stakeholders like mapped dependants, healthcare units, and or the police force. Through the convenience of PERS, senior citizens are always within arm’s reach of a single-press button to immediately summon medical assistance in the event of a fall or any other emergency.

The wearable considered here are gadgets equipped with impact or gravity sensors to detect when the wearer may have fallen. Some of the wearable gadgets are equipped with health monitoring IoT sensors. Variety of sensors embedded in a pendent or mobile phone or a watch (any wearable) are used to keep a watch on the elderly person and sudden changes are used as automated trigger indicators. These systems are monitored just like a security system. There is a monitoring team, which sits out of a central location and keeps a friendly neighbourhood watch. Technically speaking, senior citizen monitoring triggers a good amount of data flow with high velocity and variety due to different types of sensors used by IoT. Such data flows are usually very huge and are addressed with the big data platform. The data collected is washed through a big data environment and analysed for the safety and security of individuals, triggering appropriate services. The data is also used to predict emergencies with the adoption of predictive analytic techniques to mobilise healthcare or police protection resulting in reduced incidents. In simple terms PERS is used to contact help in the event of medical or other emergencies. 

The system is in practice in other countries. There are government guidelines which govern such systems, where senior citizens are serviced and taken care of. India is gearing up to witness such systems in practice. Since we are adopting and accepting the emerging way of living, there is a need for personal emergency response systems in India. It thus creates new service opportunities for enterprising entrepreneurs who can build an ecosystem addressing the security woes of senior generation. Some of the conceivable services include security monitoring to track the individual, healthcare blood pressure monitoring, sleep cycle monitoring, tablets intake monitoring and a host of other services which are considered essential. When such initiatives are triggered with a vision, it leads to new job opportunities for enterprising groups of individuals addressing the concerns of geographically dislocated families.