Support Healthy Aging with Smart Home Technology: A data ecosystem for Elderly Healthcare Monitoring

The ageing population around the world is increasing at an unprecedented rate. The percentage of the global older population (aged 65 or above) increased from 6% in 1994 to 9% in 2017 and is expected to reach 16% by 2050. This situation is more severe in developed countries; for example, 25% of Canadian citizens will be over 65 by 2030. Such demographic challenge is creating a tremendous, ongoing burden for healthcare services.

Assisted-living for seniors lowers their quality of life and places financial strain on families and our healthcare system. Successful aging in place hinges on providing environments and resources that enable people to be as independent, secure, and healthy as possible. Rapid advances in technology coupled with the Internet of Things (IoT) have resulted in an amazing opportunities for the development of active assisted living (AAL) systems for monitoring and supporting healthy living. AAL technologies have the potential
to monitor indoor behaviours, quantify cognitive and physical deterioration, and to identify early warnings for interventions.

This project is a collabration between researchers from the Research Institute for Aging in Waterloo, two smart home technology companies (Swidget and SmartONE), with the aim of developing a smart home based data ecosystem to support independent living for older adults in Canada. In this project, we propose the development of an ecosystem to aggregate data from existing smart home technologies coupled with machine learning algorithms to detect
anomalies in everyday behaviours. A remote monitoring platform would notify caregivers or family members when an expected behaviour is not observed, or a sensor reading is out of normal bounds. This project will enable caregivers and care providers to use smart home sensor data to monitor family members living independently.