TNO: Monitoring Elderly People

The amount of elderly people in the Netherlands is increasing rapidly, while the amount of working people is decreasing. Therefore, the waiting lists for elderly care homes are expanding. Elderly people will have to live at home longer, which brings challenges.

In case of calamities, the police is often the first responder. They experience a growth in number of calamities and encounter more complex issues. To unburden the police, monitoring systems in the house could be used to increase safety for elderly. These monitoring systems, also called domotics, can automatically detect various safety issues and calamities after which these systems can ask for help. There are already a lot of domotics startups, but the implementation is not widespread yet. Therefore the Dutch national police asked TNO to determine if domotics could be an addition to their work, and if so, how it can be applied. TNO will dive deeper into the complex world of domotics and asked the Tesla team to create a framework to start from. This framework will contain an overview of the current situation and an advice for promising research directions.

Inge van Ooijen, Mirjam Bruinsma