Abstract
A wearable care support system has been developed for transmitting information of a wandering elderly person's location, environmental sounds and posture. The system consists of a wandering monitor device, a conventional desktop personal computer and a caregiver's mobile phone. The wandering monitor device, which is attached behind the neck of the person's shirt, is composed of a low transmitting power personal handy-phone system(PHS)module, a small microphone, an acceleration sensor and a one chip microcontroller. The wandering elderly person's location is identified by the PHS mobile phone company's base station via the PHS module. The caregiver sets the elderly person's safe resident area to the microcontroller. When the elderly person goes out of this area, the sensor automatically records the environmental sound around the wandering person, with the microphone, for 10 seconds. The PHS module sends the elderly person's location, the environmental sound and Z axis acceleration to the server computer. The server computer automatically informs the caregiver this information by e-mail. The caregiver can monitor the map of the wandering person's location and the sound via the Internet. The sound enables the presumption of a place and the situation of the elderly person.
