Smart Home for Supporting Elderly Based On Ultrawideband Positioning System

In 2017, the rate of dependency among the elderly was reported to be at 13.28%, which was problematic, due to the limited number of caregivers to assist them at all times. To address this issue, a robotic service and vital sign-based system were developed, but it was found to be insufficient for monitoring the activities of the elderly. Therefore, this study aimed to address the high dependency rates of elderly individuals who required constant support and care to survive by designing an ultrawideband-based positioning system. The system consisted of five sub-systems, including an indoor positioning system, a database system, a data processing system, an actuator system, and an application user interface. The system testing phase revealed several important findings, including that the position coordinates of the elderly were accurately read with differences of only 98.884 mm and 279.94 under Line of Sight and Non-Line of Sight conditions, respectively. Furthermore, the initial error rate of 164.39% was successfully reduced to only 1.096% by applying the average filter method in the data processing system. The actuator system also showed an impressive accuracy rate of 98% success, while the Android-based application user interface received a high user experience rate of 92.3%. Overall, these findings suggested that the ultrawideband-based positioning system had significant potential to support smart homes for the elderly and improve their quality of life.