A Self-sustainable DTN Solution for Isolation Monitoring in Remote Areas

Global population is facing a widespread ageing. In next decades, the increasing percentage of people over sixty-five will be significant, which will impact society in several ways. The health system will be one of the sectors specially involved, exploiting the technology as a perfect allied. However, a big percentage of adults live in rural areas where almost 40% of inhabitants are seniors and technological infrastructure is often insufficient. Thus, factors like isolation, loneliness and lack of eHealth solutions conform a difficult context for this population sector. In this paper, a solution to provide isolation monitoring to elders living alone in places with lack of Internet connectivity is proposed. The proposed architecture allows the detection of emergencies in elderly's homes through presence patterns monitoring. Thus, potential home accidents or health emergencies can be detected. Furthermore, this model has been validated through simulations with the analysis of the required energy consumption, delivery probability and latency, obtaining a significant good performance.