Abstract/Summary

Technology has been seen as a possible solution to the increasing costs of healthcare and the globally aging population. It is known that many elderly people prefer to stay in their homes for as long as possible and remote monitoring can be a solution, but often such systems lack useful information or are prohibitive due to cost, ease of use/deployment and wireless coverage. This work presents a novel gateway software architecture based on threads being managed by dictionary memory. The architecture has been deployed in a distributed interconnected set of low-cost consumer grade gateway devices using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) that are positioned around the home. The gateway devices can then be used to listen, monitor or connect to BLE based healthcare sensors to continually reveal information about the user with full residential coverage. A further novelty of this work is the ability to maintain handover connections between many sensors and many gateways as a user moves throughout their home, thus the gateways can route information to/from sensors across the consumer’s home network. The system has been tested in an experimental house and is now poised to be initially deployed to 100 homes for residential healthcare monitoring before any public mass consumer deployment.