Overview
The average age growing of China’s urban population, with an increasing number of 65+ citizens, is calling for the cities to provide global services specifically geared to elderly people. More and more elderly are no longer living with their children in China.
In this context, collecting data from the elderly’s environment and his/her habits and making them available in a structured way to third parties for analysis, is the first step towards the realization of innovative user-centric services.
IoT technological advancements lead to smart objects being capable of identifying, locating, sensing, and connecting and thus leading to new forms of communication between people and things and things themselves.
ZTE Health company has developed a BLE-based weCare solution for Health monitoring elder people’s health and living conditions. It can alert users of potential health risks, such as the increased risk of falling, the possibility of dehydration, and other health conditions. How the WeCare system works will be discussed here.
Partner Description
As part of the new MICT (Mobile Information and Communication Technologies) strategy, ZTE established ZTE Health Co. Ltd, a high-tech joint venture between ZTE Corporation and Homing health care, headquartered in Shanghai. Its aim is to apply and commercialize ZTE’s health platform for elderly people and to offer customers and their families the highest possible quality of life.
ZTE wants to harness information technology and cloud services to increase the efficiency of the healthcare industry and meet the high-level, personalized requirements of consumers.
WeCare Solution Description
WeCare wants to help elder people and their direct environment (children, friends, family) to take care of themselves, so that they can live at themselves longer and happier at an affordable price, in safe circumstances, in a friendly environment, preferable to their own home, at the same time, can meet their specific elderly needs and growing concerns.
WeCare encompasses technical systems to support elderly people and people with special needs in their daily routines. The main goal of it is to maintain and foster the autonomy of those people and, thus, to increase safety in their lifestyle and in their home environment.
WeCare home care scenario is characterized by being connected, context-sensitive, personal, adaptive, and anticipative. The IoT is supposed to be capable of providing all characteristics necessary for an ambient assisted environment. With respect to the fields of needs for elderly people, it is possible to accomplish all fields through the IoT.
Figure 1. WeCare Health Information Platform
WeCare solution is an intelligent platform for the elderly care service provider, with easy and friendly interface to get to know every elder people status. It provides centralized real-time monitoring for multiple elders who live in the same building or in different locations. It can be informed immediately if something abnormal, and be informed of the potential risk is going to happen.
The above figure shows the WeCare health solution diagram. They use many BLE devices for health monitoring. BLE gateways collect the data from BLE health monitoring devices and send the data to the weCare platform for further processing. Finally, the processed information can be reviewed by users and physicians through weCare mobile apps and platform viewer.
Dusun Products Used
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) IoT gateway/hub
- Support most connectivity IoT protocols. Dusun’s gateways support most standard internet connectivity protocols including MQQT, COAP, LMW2M, etc.
- Support many connectivity types simultaneously. Dusun’s gateways can connect Bluetooth(BLE), and ZigBee, ZWave devices at the same time.
- Dusun BLE gateways have the ability to provision, update and control access to connected devices.
- Dusun’s BLE gateways/hubs take many known measures to counter communication and physical attacks. They support common encryption algorithms, hash algorithms, and authentication ways.
BLE devices for health monitoring
- BLE Oximeter
- BLE Blood pressure monitor
- BLE body weight scale
ZTE Health Wecare System Scenario
WeCare Mobile Apps (above figure) provides alarming for some abnormal and emergency, including emergency help, no room activity was monitored, sleeping late notification, returning home late notification, getting up a late notification, and abnormal toilet activities.
It can also monitor users’ real-time daily activities in the house, some Important events include going to/out of bed, in/out of home, moving or not in house, and meals.
The Wecare App can also evaluate Health Assessment Evolution from 5 different aspects. A series of detailed data includes activity, sleep quality, heart rate and respiration rate, heart rate, HSV, toilet, etc. It will self-learn the individual elderly’s habits and health status, and predict individual health status.
Base on the same intelligent platform (above figure), WeCare also provide extension smart home functions, including Smart thermostats, radon equipment, smoke alarming, oxygen quality monitoring, window and door operations, ventilation system, smart door locks, and doorbell, and security cameras if required. The platform enables full automation and does not need a manual operation or remote control.
Why Dusun Products
IoT gateways sit at the intersection of IoT systems -connected devices, controllers, and sensors – and the cloud or platform. It plays an important role in the AAL system. Dusun’s IoT gateways have the functionality and advantage of the following product:
- Great BLE performance. Great BLE performance makes it suitable for connecting many BLE smart health monitoring sensors. BLE is an open standard and is supported by most mobile phones. BLE ensures the interoperability of products from different manufacturers. The gateway supports BLE 5.0 and BLE Mesh protocols.
- Programmable and good chip-level support. Dusun smart gateways are programmable and SDKs and APIs are provided which can be used to let customers make their programs to control the data transfer procedure and use their security mechanism. The programmable ability lets China mobile and its partners embed Dusun’s gateway easily. Dusun provides chip-level technical support for their application.
- Support ZigBee and Z-Wave at the same time. This feature lets ZTE-health connect different types of IoT sensors for building their system. ZigBee and Z-wave are IoT’s important protocols.
Dusun has developed BLE devices for more than 6 years. We cooperated with some companies which are devoted to designing BLE health sensors and devices. The BLE health devices manufactured by Dusun have the following features:
- Support BLE 4.2/5.0. The sensors support the most updated protocols to suit ZTE’s health needs.
- High-cost performance ratio. The BLE health devices are manufactured by Dusun itself but designed by several companies which have rich BLE health device design experiences.
