Abstract
Loneliness among ageing people has become a significant issue for society. Its impact on health can even be exacerbated in isolated rural areas. Furthermore, the lack of Internet connection is common for these areas, contributing to such isolation. Considering this, it is important to proactively detect ageing people who experience loneliness. In this work, we propose a distributed Internet of Things (IoT) architecture to detect loneliness among elderly population living in isolated villages. The solution is based on the identification of encounters of elderly people, tracing a graph of the recurrent contacts they have. Then, this graph reflects ageing people as nodes and the social encounters as links between the nodes. Hence, it is possible to identify nodes with few contacts, reveling potential candidates to suffer unwanted loneliness. For this, the architecture draws on the collaboration between smartwatches, smartphones and Bluetooth beacons. Then, ageing people are provided with smartwatches which may store all the encounters they experience with other ageing people and neighbours in the village. Once smartwatches registry this information, it is transmitted to Bluetooth beacons. The proposed architecture aims to address the lack of communication infrastructure with a sustainable solution, exploiting the autonomy of the devices. For this, a consumption model is estimated to study the viability of the proposal, achieving successful results at power sustainability.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the 4IE+ Project (0499-4IE-PLUS-4-E) funded by the Interreg V-A España-Portugal (POCTEP) 2014–2020 program, the project RTI2018-094591-B-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE), by the Department of Economy, Science and Digital Agenda of the Government of Extremadura (GR18112, IB18030), and by the European Regional Development Fund.
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Jesús-Azabal, M., Mariano, L., García-Alonso, J., Galán-Jiménez, J. (2022). Distributed Sustainable IoT Architecture for Detecting Loneliness in Isolated Rural Areas. In: García-Alonso, J., Fonseca, C. (eds) Gerontechnology IV. IWoG 2021. Lecture Notes in Bioengineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97524-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97524-1_5
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