A Communication Infrastructure for the Health and Social Care Internet of Things: Proof-of-Concept Study

Background: Increasing life expectancy and reducing birth rates indicate that the world population is becoming older, with many challenges related to quality of life for old and fragile people, as well as their informal caregivers. In the last few years, novel information and communication technology techniques generally known as the Internet of Things (IoT) have been developed, and they are centered around the provision of computation and communication capabilities to objects. The IoT may provide older people with devices that enable their functional independence in daily life by either extending their own capacity or facilitating the efforts of their caregivers. LoRa is a proprietary wireless transmission protocol optimized for long-range, low-power, low-data-rate applications. LoRaWAN is an open stack built upon LoRa. Objective: This paper describes an infrastructure designed and experimentally developed to support IoT deployment in a health care setup, and the management of patients with Alzheimer's disease and dementia has been chosen for a proof-of-concept study. The peculiarity of the proposed approach is that it is based on the LoRaWAN protocol stack, which exploits unlicensed frequencies and allows for the use of very low-power radio devices, making it a rational choice for IoT communication. Methods: A complete LoRaWAN-based infrastructure was designed, with features partly decided in agreement with caregivers, including outdoor patient tracking to control wandering; fall recognition; and capability of collecting data for further clinical studies. Further features suggested by caregivers were night motion surveillance and indoor tracking for large residential structures. Implementation involved a prototype node with tracking and fall recognition capabilities, a middle layer based on an existing network server, and a Web application for overall management of patients and caregivers. Tests were performed to investigate indoor and outdoor capabilities in a real-world setting and study the applicability of LoRaWAN in health and social care scenarios. Results: Three experiments were carried out. One aimed to test the technical functionality of the infrastructure, another assessed indoor features, and the last assessed outdoor features. The only critical issue was fall recognition, because a slip was not always easy to recognize. Conclusions: The project allowed the identification of some advantages and restrictions of the LoRaWAN technology when applied to the health and social care sectors. Free installation allows the development of services that reach ranges comparable to those available with cellular telephony, but without running costs like telephony fees. However, there are technological limitations, which restrict the scenarios in which LoRaWAN is applicable, although there is room for many applications. We believe that setting up low-weight infrastructure and carefully determining whether applications can be concretely implemented within LoRaWAN limits might help in optimizing community care activities while not adding much burden and cost in information technology management.