A GPS Tracking Device Embedded in Prayer Beads for Early-Stage Dementia Detection

This paper proposes a prototyping of a prayer beads embedded with a GPS device, which is applied for tracking the trajectory of elderly to possibly detect the early stage of Dementia, of which the chronic diseases for elderly will lead to the deterioration in memory, thinking, behavior and ability, thus caused to the forgetfulness, losing track or losing familiar places gradually in their daily life. The prototyping mainly consists of two blocks, including, the power supply block and the computation & communication block, in which three modules, i.e. microcontroller, GSM/GPRS module and GPS module are functional and enabled by the power supply block. To timely transmit the GPS trajectory from the prototyping wore on elderly to the caregiver on their smart device or laptop anytime and anywhere, a cloud service system is proposed to coordinate the GPS information processed among the proposed GPS-based prayer beads, the cloud service system and the caregiver's mobile device. Eventually, the simulation result is shown that the trajectory of elderly can be detected and recorded through the proposed framework at a convenience manner, however, some obstacles e.g. trees, building, viaduct etc. during the tracking will tentatively lose connection and influence the positioning accuracy, that will be overcome in the future work.