Researchers led by a second-year PhD student Paddy Junior Asiimwe designed a device to monitor elderly people with dementia and cognitive impairment in rural Uganda. The device, wearable by the elderly (on the hand like a wrist watch or placed in the pocket), will monitor the patients’ movement and location and then signal the caretaker and the hospital in case of emergencies. The technology was disclosed during the research dissemination workshop held on 13th October, 2023 for the Makerere University Research and Innovations Fund (Mak-RIF) project titled, “Advanced Localisation Techniques on Smart Devices for Inclusive Location-based Services: A focus on healthy ageing for the elderly with dementia and mild cognitive impairment in rural communities”
A display of the technology design stages of the proposed wearable device to monitor elderly people with dementia and cognitive impairment in rural Uganda.
The system, basically monitors elderly people remotely using GPS technology which defines a safe zone around a user, technically calling a geofence and a PDR system (using accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer) to monitor the position of the user within the safe zone. When the elderly person is within that safe zone, the system does not need to continue tracking him. The GPS is only turned on when the user moves out of the safe zone and then sends an alert to the caretaker or to the hospital in case of emergencies.
This technology is cheap, and better than the systems existing on market and would be best recommended for more resource constrained environments. The system is going to operate independent of the user who are mostly in rural areas and cannot read and write. The system does not require electricity and runs on batteries, charged once a week and can run for 30 days. The technology was piloted in Apac district that formed the base for everything that was designed.