Mobile healthcare management : indoor movement tracking

Abstract

With an increasing number of the elderly people in Singapore suffering from mental impairment illnesses like dementia, there is a need to analyze the movement pattern of these elderly mitigating the potential dangers that they may face in their daily lives. Hence, an Indoor Mobile Tracking System (IMTS) was developed by a previous FYP student. It is a mobile device which provides the indoor tracking functionalities with grid transition tracking based on Wi-Fi Fingerprinting techniques. However, it lacks the ability to track the elderly precisely in a room-sized area.

In this project, an improved IMTS for detection of movement of the elderly or people within an indoor environment was developed. Wi-Fi, magnetic field and inertial based indoor positioning technologies have been successfully employed and integrated into the system as the positioning methodologies for the system.A Samsung Galaxy S4 embedded with sensors is used as the client device carried by the users while 3 Wi-Fi Access Points were positioned at different regions of the indoor location as the supporting system. Testing was carried out to verify the feasibility of the magnetic field indoor positioning for IMTS and the functionalities of the IMTS within the Hardware Project Lab in School of Computer Engineering.

Resolutions of user position and user tracking of the IMTS was shown to be improved through the implementation of new indoor positioning algorithm and technologies. IMTS provides real time display and updates of the user position, thus the system is able to gain more information of the user movement pattern. The integrated system provides a cost-effective and flexible in deployment in any indoor environment where accuracy is not compromised.