Design and implementation of an unobtrusive sensor system to support incontinence care of elderly in nursing homes

Incontinence is a very common condition among nursing home residents. This not only leads to physical and mental burden for the elderly residents, but also to an increased workload for care personnel. In order to lower this imposed workload, numerous technologies exist to support incontinence care. These systems, however, are expensive for the nursing homes and inconvenient for the residents. To solve these problems, we propose a new sensor system now attached to the bed that is able to monitor and detect incontinence events. Using Bluetooth Low Energy and the time-based database InfluxDB a prototype was built. The sensor data can be stored in real-time and can be made available to other systems for further processing. In future systems, security measures can be added, and energy measurements can be done to make the system fully portable.