Safety Confirmation of Elderly People by Monitoring Home Electric Appliances

Abstract

In recent years, Japan has been faced with an increasingly aging society, which has resulted in problems such as a shortage of care workers and a growing number of elderly people living alone. The Cabinet Office of Japan anticipates that these problems will become more serious in the future. It will be increasingly difficult for elderly people to receive care. Here, we propose a system for confirming the safety of elderly people. Using the proposed system, which is equipped with a magnetic resistance (MR) sensor, we can infer the safety of elders from the operation of electrical home appliances. When a home appliance is operated, the current passing through its power cable produces a magnetic field, which can be detected by the MR sensor. Therefore, the proposed system detects the operational status of home appliances, which allows us to confirm the safety of elderly people.