Abstract

This paper proposes “An Emergency Situation Detection System for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)”, to support elderly people and patients with chronic conditions and potential health-related emergencies to live independently. It implements an Internet of Things (IoT) network that continuously monitors the health conditions of these people. The network includes mobile phones, to transmit the data generated by the IoT sensors to the cloud server. Especially, the paper proposes the 3 ^rd party unknown mobile relays instead of dedicated gateways as opposed to many existing solutions for IoT healthcare applications. The wireless communication technology used to provide the connectivity between the sensor nodes and mobile relays is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). To establish a secure end-to-end connectivity between low power IoT sensor nodes and cloud servers, the paper proposes several techniques. After the medical data transmission to the cloud server, it is responsible for emergency detection and alert generation accordingly. The type of emergency is not limited to a specific health issue, but new emergency situations can be defined and added to the proposed system. Ultimately, the interested parties such as family members, caretakers and doctors receive these alerts. The development of a prototype of the system as a part of the work using commercial off-the-shelf devices verifies the validity of the proposing system and evaluates the performance advantage over the existing systems.