M W Raad
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia
Title: A home based telehealth system for elderly with Alzheimer’s
Biography
Biography: M W Raad
Abstract
By 2020, chronic diseases predicted to account for almost three quarters of all deaths worldwide. According to World Health Organization, the elderly population is expected to become 1.2 billion in 2025. This aging problem contributes greatly to chronic diseases like Alzheimer. The major implications of Alzheimer are patient safety and care. The aim of this paper is to develop a tele-health system, based on internet of things (IoT) technology, for monitoring elderly individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s. We describe a working prototype that is able to capture the vital signs and deliver the desired data remotely for elderly staying at home, using wearable ECG wireless sensor. This prototype has been successfully tested to capture data on a 24/7 basis for a number of patients and volunteer physicians at the KFUPM clinic which helps discover severe cases early on. The developed system includes a suit of signal processing algorithms for the detection of severe cases of arrhythmias in elderly patients. In particular, we use wavelets transform to estimate a number of features from ECG traces which are then used in classification. Our results were benchmarked against the standard MIT physiobank. The performance of the system was also tested on simulated data with very satisfactory results, and very positive feedback from users. In addition, an active wearable RFID wristband, with IR room locators are used to monitor the whereabouts of the elderly at room level.