A monitoring platform shows a senior citizen's physical conditions at Baihe Nursing Home. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Baihe Nursing Home, located in Wuxi, in eastern Jiangsu province, has managed to improve its elderly care services significantly with a host of IoT applications.

An intelligent mattress is used that can measure the physical conditions of a senior such as  heartbeat and breathing rate, and send related data through the wifi to a central monitoring platform so that caretakers can have a real-time check of their client's health conditions, without the need for human intervention.

The mattress can also sense when a senior is out of bed for more than a set time period, and trigger an alarm to the monitoring platform for caretakers to check if any emergency such as a fall happens.

For daily care, a mobile app is designed that connects caretakers with the elderly and the monitoring platform. Caretakers get a unique to-do-list for each of the seniors under their charge simply by scanning the special intelligent ID cards of the latter. Records are be left on the app after each job is done and will be shown on the monitoring platform for managers to check.

In addition to the ID card, every senior also wears another smart card that serves as a "body guard" when they are out of the room. Receivers are installed every 10 meters in the corridor ceiling to receive signals sent by the card and transmit them to the monitoring platform and the caretakers' mobile app to help locate and monitor the elderly.

During an emergency, a senior citizen merely presses the "SOS" button on the card to trigger an alarm, informing caretakers to rush to the scene. Surrounding videos are also be triggered to give a thorough picture of what is going on, so appropriate aid is given in real time.

The entire intelligent service system is provided by CAS Nor-West Star, a local high-tech company pioneering the development of IoT applications for elderly care services in China.

"The system we designed for the nursing home realizes the efficient monitoring of caretakers' work by quantifying their tasks on the mobile app, while the intelligent devices guarantee efficient care for the elderly as caretakers won't need to manually measure and record the elderly's conditions, which not only facilitates their work but also makes it more convenient to analyze and manage the elderly's records," said Zhang Wenjun from the technical service department of CAS Nor-West Star.

A full range of intelligent devices are on display at CAS Nor-West Star in Wuxi, in Jiangsu province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]