The team has made a genuine contribution to society by sharing the advances which it has made. The experience will stay with them for the rest of their careers.
- Professor Clemens Kaminski, Director of the Sensor CDT, Cambridge
As part of their Master of Research programme at the University’s EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sensor Technologies and Applications last year, the ten students were given 12 weeks to develop an integrated suite of wireless devices to enable family members and carers to monitor the wellbeing of an older person, remotely and with minimal invasion of privacy.
Details of the team’s breakthrough have just been published in The Royal Society’s Interface Focus journal.
According to The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, around one in three adults aged over 65 who live at home will suffer at least one fall a year; and in 2009, in England and Wales alone, this age group accounted for 7,475 deaths as a result of an accident. Nevertheless, the vast majority of older people would still prefer to stay in their own homes until it is impossible for them to do so, rather than move into residential care.
Three million people in the UK are aged 80 or over, and the number of people aged over 85 is set to double in the next 20 years. With ageing populations placing increasing pressure on health services in the UK and many other countries, there is growing demand for assisted living technologies to enable older people to live independently and safely in their own homes for longer.
But as team member Oliver Bonner, an electronics engineer, explains: “Existing monitoring devices are often too bulky, only perform one function and can’t be integrated because manufacturers don’t want their products used alongside those of rival brands. What we’ve done is develop an open platform so that anyone who invents an ingenious assistive device can bring that into the system and enhance what it can do for older people.”
The interdisciplinary team – comprising engineers, chemists, biochemists, materials scientists and physicists – designed and incorporated five assistive devices into their sensor suite: a door sensor, power monitor, fall detector, general in-house sensor unit, and an on-person location-aware communications device. The group improved on existing devices, in part, by taking advantage of recent developments in 3D printing, printed circuit board production and electronics prototyping.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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