Veterans House Caring
Shikan Zheng, Zhi Du, Yihan Cao, Xinming Wei and Chong Li
Department of MSCS, Marquette University
ABSTRACT
The health problems of the elderly have
increasingly become one of the most important
social topics. Especially veterans, they have
contributed to the country and as time goes by,
many diseases plague veterans and one of the most
important issues is the falling. Our group plan to
develop an application on mobile device so that
family of veterans can notice motion changes of the
veterans in time. The whole project includes a
mobile application, a motion sensor, database and .
Mobile application is developed through Android
studio; The motion sensor is from Thunderboard
sense II; Database is built by MySQL and
webpages are written by PHP and HTML.
Keywords: Veterans, Android studio, Motion
sensor, Thunderboard Sense II, MySQL, PHP,
HTML.
1. INTRODUCTION
There are over 2 million US soldiers have
experienced war in Iraq and Afghanistan since the
1980s. When they return back to home, more and
more barriers appear to their life and the society. [1]
Disability caused by war is a barrier to continue
their positive life. Some disabled veterans will
encounter difficulties in life, such as falling. As the
development of technology, mobile devices could
be an efficient tool for taking care of veterans’
health and behavior management.
The focus of our project is to design an app that
allows veterans to keep an eye on their motion
status. At same time, the motion status can be
present on the webpage so that family of veterans
can take action as soon as possible in some
emergency situations. Hence, developing such a
mobile application is important and necessary to
take care of veterans and help them to live better.
For related work, there are so many elderly living
assistant software or applications and one of the
most common application is smart watch or wrist
band. Also, for this topic so many articles can be
found online. For example, A. Sixsmith and N,
Johnson published an article named “A Smart
Sensor to Detect the Falls of the Elderly” in 2004.
The goal of our project is not only just developing
an application that can monitor the movement of
veterans but also building a website so that
veterans’ son and daughter can check the motion
information for their parents anytime. If there are
any accident, they can react quickly, such as calling
ambulance. At the same time, the veteran's motion
data is stored in a database, and the data is
displayed in a web page in the form of a line chart.
The horizontal axis of the line chart is time and the
vertical axis is direction. A total of three line charts
are generated in three directions of x, y, and z. The
family can observe the changes of the elderly
activities over time through the line chart on the
webpage, so that the purpose of caring for the
elderly can be achieved.
For the contribution of team members. Zhi and
Yihan is responsible for the development of the
Android application; Xinming is in charge of
establishment of the database; Chong and Shikan is
working on the part of building websites. For most
of us, this project is a new field and it is kind of
hard to identify the technology. But we do our best
to search the information and write the code. The
results may not be perfect, but each of us has
learned from this project, which is definitely
helpful for our future study.
The outline of the paper is as follows: In section 2,
we present some scenarios to describe the necessity
of our project. The characteristics are in the section
3. The related works and a comparison table are
presented in section 4 and 5. In the section 6, it is
the overviews and details of our project. The
evaluation is in the section 7. We conclude the
strength and weakness of our results and mention
some future research in the final section.
2. MOTIVATION
Our project, veterans house caring, can be apply in
many situations. Because the federal law, we
cannot interview any veterans without permission,
so we can only make up some examples or
scenarios. Here we are imaging some pragmatic
scenarios where our design can be efficiently used.
Attention: The scenarios we describe below are
all imagined, they are not real stories!
Scenario 1
Assuming there is a Vietnam War veteran. He is 76
years old this year. In a battle that year, he lost a
leg. As time went by, the life of john became more
and more difficult.He often cannot stand stable due
to the disability. Whatever eating or going to the
toilet it is both inconvenient and dangerous for him.
His family is very worried about him. In order to
take good care of him, his family decide to buy him
a house falling caring device. Using this device,
family member can check the motion condition of
him any time. It helps this veteran live better and
his family work better.
Scenario II