SUGISAKAMASANORI

Journal of Advances in Artificial Life Robotics
Vol. 1(4); March (2021), pp. 209–213
ON LINE ISSN 2435-8061; ISSN-L 2435-8061
https://alife-robotics.org/jallr.html

Research Article

Design and Implementation of in-home Wireless Crucial Events
Logging and Alarming System for Elderly and Disabled People
Care
Ali S. Al-Mejrad
Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences, Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences University of Hail, Hail, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

ARTICLE INFO
Article History
Received 03 November 2020
Accepted 09 February 2021
Keywords
Elderly
Disabled people

ABSTRACTThis paper aims at developing a system that will help in in-home care for elderly or disabledpeople. The system can record the patient vital parameters such as temperature, SpO2, ECG,
heart rate, bed moisture and fall off sensor with features of the system ability to adapt newsensors if needed. The system could be installed at the bathroom or shower area at the patient
terminal and transmit the critical situations such as high or low values to an alarming system.
The system will be developed using the National Instrument Wireless Sensor Network (NIWSN) to control the crucial events transmission and LabVIEW software to design the userinterface

In-home care
NI-WSN
PSoC
Virtual1.

© 2022 The Author. Published by Sugisaka Masanori at ALife Robotics Corporation Ltd.
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

the Internet keeps the Elderly and disabled people withinreach of their help providers and family. This method oftransmitting selected data only when required rather thanstreaming all data continuously, is perfect method formonitoring critical situations and activating alarms forthese crucial events [4],[5]. Elderly people in Saudi Arabia
are suffering from chronic health conditions such as
chronic cardio-respiratory diseases, which is one of themajor causes of admission to hospital in addition to manyother concurrent problems [6]. Due to frequent
occurrences of such diseases to these people who in needfor continuous care will lead to costly hospitalization ofsuch patients. In this paper a system will be developed thatwill help in in-home care for elderly or disabled people byrecording the patient vital parameters such as SPO2, heartrate, ECG, temperature, bed moisture, and fall off sensor
on the chair or the bed. In addition, these sensors could beinstalled at the bathroom or shower area at the patient
terminal and transmit the crucial events such as high or low
values to an alarming system. The system will be
developed using the National Instrument Wireless Sensor
Network (NI-WSN) to control the curial events
transmission and virtual software as the user interface.

Introduction

The growth in the number and proportion of elderly anddisable people are significantly increase which lead to theneed of a special care system to give these people a chance
to live depending on themselves [1]. The resources forsuch special people of in-patient facilities are limited andexpensive. In addition to that, Elderly people are suffering
many health problems, mobility limitation, and chronic
physical problems and, other disorders compared toyounger age people. All of which are requiring special
continuous attention and care. The family and/or otherhelp provider often shares the task of caring for thesepeople. However, the elderly usually remain independentand alone at home and this becomes a critical issue due tonon-availability of their help provider. While at home,smart sensors such as body temperature and ECG sensors
can be used to wirelessly connect through NI-WSN to aComputer, which will record and analyze different
parameters such as, body temperature, blood pressure,cardiac function and many others [2],[3]. A connection toCorresponding author’s E-mail: a.almejrad@uoh.edu.sa209

2.

First, a prototype test system of three main signals
including pulse oximeter, temperature and ECG using
PSoC is developed to ensure the success of the datacollection. The block diagram of the prototype test systemwith LCD shown in Figure 2 consisting of three main
traces are described below:

System Development

The designed system in the block diagram consists ofdifferent components as shown below in Figure 1.

(E )Figure 1. Block Diagram of the Designed System
The system has two major components; the console that isfixed at the patient chair, bed, or even held with the patientwith the NI-WSN-3202 wireless module [7] and the othercomponent is the NI-WSN-9791 Ethernet gateway [8]connected to the PC that is also connected to an alarming
system to trigger alarm on crucial events. A user interface
virtual software using is developed to control the wirelessmodule and collect the data of patient events such as highheart rate, high temperature, and fall off the chair or bed[9].

Figure 2. Prototype test system of three main signals
including pulse oximeter, temperature and ECG using
PSoC
3.1 Pulse Oximeter:
First module is Pulse Oximeter of frequency range of 1Hz
to 40Hz. The sensor used in this module is photo sensor
sender and receiver, the finger of the patient locatedbetween the them, the infrared opt coupler will detect thevolume change in finger’s capillaries and to obtain bloodflow profile.

Measurement node NI-WSN-3202:
The measurement nodes connect directly with sensor andare able to transmit wirelessly a 2.4 GHz radio data to theWSN Ethernet gateway. Each measurement node has four
analog input channels and four digital Input/output
channels.

Programmable Gain Amplifier (PGA)
The received light is converted into an electric signal by aphotodiode and then enters the first block inside the PSoC
controlled is PGA here which act as a buffer to match thecircuit input output impedance, and also amplify the output
signal with gain of 4.

The measurement nodes and the NI WSN-9791 Ethernet
gateway:
The measurement nodes and the Ethernet gateway
communicate wirelessly using a radio frequency of 2.4
GHz based on the reliable IEEE 802.15.4 NI WSN
protocol. The network can accommodates up to 36 nodes
with range of up to 300 m.

Filters
The second block is filter. The first part is second order
low pass filter (LPF) with corner frequency of 100Hz
which is used to cut the high frequency component, while
the other filter is band pass filter (BPF) which is used to
cut plethysmograph signal band of 1-40Hz.

Microcontroller PSoC (CY8C29466-24PVXI)
Programmable System on Chip (PSoC) is a programmableembedded system on chip which integrating on a single
chip configurable digital and analog peripheral functions,memory and a microcontroller [10],[11].
3.

(C)Pulse Peak detector and pulse counter
The function of this block is to detect the peaks of thesignal and pass it to the pulse counter, which is a digitalcounter in order to count the heart rate.

Results and Discussion

210

ADC Converter

ADC Converter

The analog to digital converter is used to acquire the signal
in digital form in order to display it on the LCD; here weuse the PSoC 12 bits ADC converter with sampling rate of50.

The analog to digital converter is used to acquire the signal
in digital form in order to display it on the LCD. The PSoC
used is 12 bits ADC converter with sampling rate of 50.
Finally, the signal will be handled by to the PSoC internal
controller in order to display it on the LCD.

Finally, the output signal is handled by to the PSoC
internal controller in order to display it on the LCD.

3.4 Designed PSoC Circuit Diagram

3.2 Temperature
PGAThe PGA amplifies the sensing signal from the bridge
circuit and pass it to the ADC converter.
ADC Converter
Converts the thermistor voltage into digital form to thePSoC internal controller to check the calibration tables anddisplay the temperature on the LCD by using the graphic
LCD routine.

Figure 4. Designed PSoC circuit diagram

3.2 ECG

The analog signals of the three signals sampled in PSoC
micro-controller designed as shown in Figure 4 are thenstored in the system EEPROM and/or the MMC card on
the system shown in Figure 1 for later analysis. The digital
data is wired to the measurement node NI-WSN-3202 thatis responsible for the wireless transfer of the data to the NI
WSN-9791 Ethernet gateway receiver. The receiver node
is connected to the PC through the Ethernet port for datacollection and alarm triggering. Experimentation utilizing
the prototype based on wireless technology with the PSoC
system has shown that the communication range varies
from 30 to 50 meters depends on the home walls that issufficient.

Instrumentation Amplifier
In our system, some external circuits (outside the PSoCcontroller) were made such as Instrumentation amplifier
and isolator circuit because of some limitation in theranges of the PSoC.
Filters
Two types of filter were used. The first block is second
order Band Pass filter, which is used to cut the high andlow noise and pass only the ECG signal (1-150 Hz). The
other filter is Notch filter that is used to cut mains
frequency of 60Hz. The response of the amplifier circuit
has been verified using simulation software as illustratedin Figure 3 bellow

3.5 Designed System and its User Interface
The complete system components is shown in Figure 5 andhardware test setup is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 3. The total ECG filter response
PGA
PGA act as the main amplifier of the ECG signal, of gainof 16.

Figure 5. The complete system components

211freedom and safety; and prevent patient condition
deterioration. This in turn will improve the elderly life
quality.
The designed system was developed as a prototype test
system including three signals: pulse oximeter,
temperature and ECG using PSoC with LCD. The future
work is reducing the system size using the Analog Front
End (AFE) chips that include almost all necessarycomponents for the physiological signal pickup from thepatient. This in turn will result in a contributed decreasedin power consumption and of course in the cost as well.

Figure 6. Hardware test setup with user interface
The system includes main components including a userinterface program as shown in Figure 7. The system isdeveloped to control the whole system by logging in thesystem and then configuring the events with minimum andmaximum limits and configuring wireless module. Whenrunning, the system starts patient data acquisition, anddisplay of the data and events of the patient such as hightemperature, high heart rate, low oxygen saturation, andfall off the chair or bed. Finally, patient’s data and events
can be analyzed for follow-up and diagnosis purposes.

Acknowledgment
I would like to thank my research assistant for his help insome technical work. In addition, I would like to extend
my appreciation to University of Hail, KSA.
References
1-United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,Population Division. World Population Ageing(ST/ESA/SER.A/390),2015.
2- Eduardo Freitas and Amandio Azevedo, “WirelessBiomedical Sensor Networks: The Technology”,
Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress on ElectricalEngineering and Computer Systems and Science(EECSS'16) Budapest, Hungary –August16 – 17, 2016.
3- Demongeot, J. et al.,”Multi-sensors acquisition, data fusion,
knowledge mining and alarm triggering in health smart
homes for elderly people”, C. R. Biologies 325:673–682,
2002.
4- Peeters, P. H., “Design criteria for an automatic safetyalarm system for elderly”, Technol. Health Care, 8:81–91,2000.
5- A. Tzavaras, and B. Spyropoulos, “ Development of a lowcost wireless monitoring System supporting the Continuityof Medical Care of the Patient at home”, 35th Annual
International Conference of the IEEE EMBS Osaka, Japan,
3 - 7 July, 2013.
6- Khan J. et al., “The Saudi Guidelines for the Diagnosis andManagement of COPD”, Ann Thorac Med. 9(2): pp.55–76,2014.
7- NI-WSN-3202 wireless module – User guide andSpecifications,2010
8- NI WSN-9791 Ethernet Gateway – User guide andSpecifications,2010.l
9- National Instruments Corporation, “LabVIEW UserManual”, Edition 2014.
10- Cypress Semiconductors, PSoC 5LP Development Kit
Guide, Document No. 001-65816 Rev. *G, 2013.
11- Sousa L. et al., '' Embedded System Design: Techniques andTrends", Springer, vol. 231, pp. 353-362, 2007.

Figure 7. User Interface System

4.

Conclusion and Future WorkThe designed system goal is to provide in home, selfdependent, monitoring for critical events, and alarming
system. The designed system is monitoring the vital signsof the patient such as SpO2, heart rate, temperature, ECG,
and the critical status (wet clothes and fallen off the chair)
which are added easily as ON/OFF in order to trigger
alarms for such events.
The system is connected to a PC that can easily transfer thecollected data on the web for long distance further data
analysis and/or call for help. This continuous remotemonitoring and support will increase the elderly people212

Authors Introduction
Dr. Ali AlMejrad
He received the B.Sc. with 1st honor inElectrical Engineering from King Saud
University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
M.Sc.
in
Bioengineering
fromStrathclyde University, UK in 1987 and1990, respectively; and the PhD. in
Medical engineering from Universityof Edinburgh, UK, in 1996. He is currently an Associate
Professor of Medical Engineering and Instrumentation in
Clinical Laboratory Sciences in the College of Applied
Medical Sciences, UoH, KSA. His research interests
include Development of Biomedical Instrumentation andIntelligent Systems for Health Care using advanced
Technologies. He is a member of IEEE and IPEM.

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