Recognition of Loneliness of the Elderly People in Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Abstract

These days, aging of population is becoming serious problem more and more. Due to this aging, problems of suffering of unbearable pains of lonely single living old people with inconvenient movement in loneliness are occurring. Existing studies have focused only on the management of physical health of the aged but in this paper, on the contrary, psychological issues of the aged, in particular, lonely situation of the aged is reviewed. For this, system that can recognize lonely situation of the aged automatically and solve loneliness by monitoring behaviors of the aged is necessary. However, it is impossible to quantify lonely situation as there are lots of differences per each individual. In order to solve this problem, flexibility of system is required in adding or revising situations in which each individual feels loneliness. Therefore, in this paper, methods to ratiocinate lonely situation using rule are suggested. This method has advantage of no need to revise internal code as only rule can be modified when situation, in which the aged feels loneliness, is added or revised. In this thesis, system ratiocinating loneliness of the aged was designed and realized using RFID tag and reader and matters to be improved in the future are pointed out.