Abstract—With declining birth rates and rising life
expectancy, population ageing is accelerating recently. As more
and more elderly people live alone, it is generating a new social
question of solitary death. The purpose of this paper is to
suggest an intelligent residential service designed to prevent and
manage solitary fall death in the house of the elderly people who
live alone. It explains an intelligence service for promptly
responding to emergency situations in the stages following an
accident. Through an analysis of 1,745 behavioral patterns
involving thirteen solitary elderly people based on the
self-administered questionnaire that proceeded in earlier
studies, we have focused on kitchen, which registered the
highest space usage frequency, and proposed an organization of
sensors and instruments needed for the intelligent service as
well as the service process. This thesis is significant in that it
presents and discusses a solution to the problem of solitary fall
deaths through an analysis of behavioral patterns and by using
IT. Besides, its contribution consists in suggesting a method for
applying IT in a house through an analysis of the behavior of
solitary seniors in the house and of the indoor environment.
Index Terms—Smart service, solitary, elderly, fall death.
The authors are with the Interior Architecture and Built Environment
Department, Yonsei University, Seoul Republic of Korea (e-mail:
hyunsoolee@yonsei.ac.kr).
[PDF]
Cite: Hyun Soo Lee and Sung Hee Lee, "Smart Services for Managing Solitary Fall Death in a
House of the Elderly Living Alone," International Journal of Engineering and Technology vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 410-418, 2015.
