As the world's population ages and health and assisted living facilities are under increasing pressure to provide adequate care for the elderly, cellular IoT-based remote monitoring solutions are filling this gap by providing the elderly with convenient, accurate, and remote monitoring devices to improve the quality of medical care for the elderly. In this article, we'll take a look at the current dilemmas in medical care for the elderly and the solutions offered by Nordic.
The elderly are still under-represented in the use of technology
Countries around the world often face an aging population, and the elderly are the main group who often need to go to the hospital, which places a heavy burden on governments. However, most sick patients do not like to go to the doctor or move from their home to an aged care facility, because in addition to the inconvenience of moving out of their long-term home, factors such as loss of independence, boredom, loneliness, or fear of being forgotten are common reasons for resisting moving to an aged care facility.
While there are few ways to reverse the passage of time and the aging process, technology offers more and more ways to help people move away from hospitals and aged care in some cases, and healthcare delivery has shifted to become increasingly reliant on technology and data-driven in order to move away from “virtual” care in hospitals or doctors' clinics. However, while the pandemic may have accelerated the adoption of technology, a major barrier to adoption is that many older adults do not trust or understand the technology at all, making it difficult to implement in practice.
According to a recent study by Pew Research, while the use of technology by people over the age of 65 has increased significantly over the past decade, only 61% of Americans in that age group own a smartphone today, and only 75% are Internet users. Penetration remains low compared to smartphone ownership (96%) and internet use (99%) among people of 18 to 29 years old. Adoption is even lower among older Americans in terms of wearables, with only 19% of those aged 55 and older owning such devices by 2021, according to Statista. Going forward, there must be a gradual increase in the adoption of technology solutions for seniors to help them stay in their own homes or to help aged care facilities provide more effective care in the face of staff shortages.
The convenience of cellular IoT improves technology utilization for the elderly
While Bluetooth LE remains the most popular wireless technology for connected wearables, cellular IoT is gaining popularity among health-related wearables because it eliminates the need for intermediate connectivity, requiring no smartphone or gateway for the wearer and no intervention for continuous monitoring. For the elderly, this means no pairing, no smartphones, no remembering Wi-Fi network passwords, just reliably and securely sending data to the cloud.
Because the elderly are more challenged when using new technologies, these wearables must be easy to use and must be easy for users to operate without having to find an app on their phone or trying to remember their username and password. This is especially important as time is of the essence for missing or injured persons.
Reassuringly, LTE-M and NB-IoT low-power cellular IoT offer the gold standard of reliable and secure connectivity for life-or-death applications. In terms of coverage, operators have rolled out the same nationwide coverage network as cellular networks around the world. This means that most industrialized countries, as well as a growing number of developing countries, offer ubiquitous NB-IoT and/or LTE-M coverage.
Cellular IoT is also the most secure communication technology, with built-in security features that are part of the 3GPP standard. Additional security can also be applied to chip-level devices that provide a secure design product development process. For example, Nordic's nRF9160 low-power SiP integrates an LTE-M/NB-IoT modem, leveraging additional layers of security from Arm TrustZone and Arm CryptoCell for Internet-level encryption and application protection. This level of security gives both developers and consumers peace of mind, especially when it comes to medical wearables processing and transmitting potentially sensitive personal information.
Wearable devices for cellular IoT-based health monitoring are gaining popularity
A number of companies have developed cellular IoT-based wearable devices for elderly health monitoring that can be used to track and monitor individuals with Alzheimer's, dementia, or autism and can be applied to aged care facilities or individuals living independently. These wearables support LTE-M connectivity and GNSS positioning, report the wearer's location to family, friends, or caregivers when the wearer is missing, and integrate an accelerometer to detect if the wearer is likely to fall.
In addition, there are a number of cloud-cellular IoT-connected healthy wearables that continuously monitor and record a range of key health indicators, including pulse oximeters, temperature, and inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors to determine heart rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure, and temperature vital signs, and even ECG sensors to record heart rate and rhythm, as well as GPS positioning and fall detection.
Wearables can further integrate cellular IoT and Bluetooth LE connectivity into their new healthcare wearable devices to meet the dual use of remote healthcare/telecare solutions, as well as versatile devices, where the wearer can connect to their smartphone and the device can act as a smartwatch for activity logging, inactivity alerts, sleep monitoring, and fall detection.
These features provide Bluetooth LE connectivity through Nordic's nRF52832, support for call and notification relays from smartphones to wearables, and also support Bluetooth LE beacon profiles that allow connection of beacon accessories for indoor location tracking.
Compact and highly integrated system- in-package
Introduced by Nordic, the nRF9160 is a low-power system-in-package (SiP) with integrated LTE-M/NB-IoT modems and GPS, a compact, highly integrated system-in-package (SiP) that makes the latest low-power LTE technology, advanced processing, and secure access capabilities easy to use and suitable for a variety of single-device low-power cellular Internet of Things (cIoT) designs.
The nRF9160 has a built-in Arm Cortex-M33 application processor, a full LTE modem, radio frequency front end (RFFE), and power management system. The nRF9160 is a market-leading, compact, comprehensive, and energy-efficient cellular IoT solution. The nRF9160 integrated modem supports LTE-M and NB-IoT and can operate worldwide without any regional variants. All power-saving features, including eDRX and PSM, support IPv4/IPv6, transport and security (TCP/TLS) levels, and modem firmware upgrades via secure, encrypted firmware over-the-air (FOTA).
The nRF9160's built-in Arm Cortex-M33 application processor with 1 MB of flash memory and 256 KB of RAM makes advanced application development possible in a single device solution and integrates a GPS receiver to provide a variety of operating modes to accommodate a variety of applications using location tracking. The nRF9160 also has built-in versatile interfaces and peripheral options, including 12-bit ADC, RTC, SPI, I²C, I²S, UARTE, PDM, and PWM.
The nRF9160 utilizes Arm TrustZone technology for isolation and protection of firmware and hardware components, including memory and peripherals. Its security features are superior to similar products. Arm TrustZone helps build reliable, secure IoT applications with secure booting, trusted firmware updates, and trust root execution without compromising performance.
The nRF9160 supports Arm CryptoCell to further enhance security by providing cryptographic algorithms and security resources to help protect your IoT applications from a variety of attack threats. CryptoCell is designed for high-performance cryptographic solutions optimized for energy-constrained devices. The nRF9160 supports both SIM and eSIM cards for connectivity and authentication with mobile network operators.
The nRF9160 hardware and development kit is in mass production for full end-to-end sensor-to-cloud development, and Nordic is still developing new features and optimizing performance. The nRF9160 supports LTE bands B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B8, B12, B13, B14, B17, B18, B19, B20, B25, B26, B28, and B66 and is also certified.
Bluetooth Low Energy SoC with multi-protocol and multi-function support
nRF52832, another system-on-chip (SoC) from Nordic, is a versatile Bluetooth 5.4 SoC that supports Bluetooth Low Energy, Bluetooth Mesh, and NFC. nRF52832 is a general-purpose multi-protocol SoC that meets the application challenges of advanced Bluetooth Low Energy® features, protocol concurrency, and rich peripherals and feature sets. In addition, it provides plenty of memory space for flash and RAM.
The nRF52832 employs multiple protocols with full protocol concurrency capability. It supports Bluetooth Low Energy, including 2 Mbps high transmission speed. Bluetooth Mesh can run concurrently with Bluetooth Low Energy, enabling smartphones to provision, commission, configure, and control Mesh nodes. NFC, ANT, and 2.4 GHz proprietary protocols are also supported.
The nRF52832 is based on the Arm® Cortex™-M4 CPU with floating point unit, clocked at 64 MHz. It has built-in NFC-A tags for simplified pairing and payment solutions. It has many digital peripherals and interfaces, such as PDM and I2S for digital microphones and audio, and achieves extremely low power consumption through a sophisticated on-chip adaptive power management system.
Conclusion
More and more remote monitoring technology solutions allow the elderly to live more comfortably at home, away from hospitals and aged care centers. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of wireless medical solutions, but at present, users over the age of 60 are insufficiently represented in the user base. Cellular IoT is favored by remote monitoring devices because it is reliable, secure, and does not require smartphones, gateways, or user intervention. Related products will have great potential for future market development. Nordic's wireless solution will reduce the volume and power consumption of remote monitoring devices, which is worthy of further understanding and adoption by manufacturers interested in entering the healthcare application market.