A novel approach for addressing wandering off elderly using low cost passive RFID tags

Abstract

Wandering (e.g. elopement) by elderly persons at acute hospitals and nursing homes poses a significant problem to providing patient care as such incidents can lead to injury and even accidental morbidity. These problems are particularly serious given aging populations around the world. While various technologies exit (such as door alarms), they are expensive and the reliability of such systems have not been evaluated in the past. In this article we propose two novel methods for a very low cost solution to address the problem of wandering off patients using body worn low cost passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags using phase based measurements. Our approach requires no modification to the air interface protocols, firmware or hardware. Results from extensive experiments show that: (i) the proposed algorithms can accurately identify whether a person is moving into or out of, for example, a room; and (ii) it can be implemented in real-time to develop a low cost wandering off alarm.