A Novel Sensor-Assisted RFID-Based Indoor Tracking System for the Elderly Living Alone

The population of elderly people is increasing rapidly in many developed nations. Providing safe and comfortable care to aging people is an important social goal. Moreover, obtaining correct activity and location information for an elderly person is an important research goal. This work proposes a novel intelligent RFID-based indoor tracking system for elderly people living alone. The proposed system uses environment information for inhabitants and received signal strength of an RFID reader to estimate the probable location of an inhabitant. The proposed system then coordinates with the wireless sensor node of a three-axis accelerometer and uses a genetic algorithm to compute the location of the inhabitant. The proposed system also uses context and gait information to improve inhabitant-tracking accuracy. Experiment results show that the accuracy of the proposed system is better than that of existing RFID-based systems.