As populations age, there is a growing need for the establishment and staffing of care centers, but the supply of such facilities is not keeping pace with demand. Existing hospitals, care centers, and other institutions currently provide care for many physically disabled and elderly patients. For these patients to go outside in the fresh air, they must necessarily leave their designated care areas, but this poses a risk of falls and other accidents, which can be particularly challenging to prevent or respond to the given staffing limitations. Such incidents can cause further physical and mental deterioration. Many studies have sought to minimize rescue response times by first establishing the incident location before alerting staff to respond. However, this approach does not guarantee minimized response times. This paper proposes an approach to allow medical staff to quickly arrive at the scene of an accident with patients and staff using mobile devices to automatically alert a central server of their current locations. In response to an accident notification, the server immediately alerts medical staff in closest proximity to the incident to respond, with the staff devices providing clear directions to reach the patient in distress, thus minimizing response times. The proposed system can operate while maintaining security and patient information privacy, including the data integrity, anonymity, authentication, location confidentiality, location unforgeability, and resistance to asynchronous and tracking attacks, and is implemented on Android smart phones. The proposed system can be used in homes, hospitals, care centers, or any other venue offering long-term care. This proposal is the first such real-time and automated emergency rescue alert system to provide both information privacy and authentication.

INTRODUCTION

Hospitals care for many patients and elderly people who, due to mobility issues, are at risk of falls, and may require quick response in the event of an accident, thus raising the need for medical staff to immediately and accurately locate accident victims. Positioning technology offers significant advantages to this end. Long-Term Care: Today, many countries seek to establish long-term care systems to provide quality, affordable and universal care for the elderly, allowing them to enjoy their old age in a familiar environment, while reducing the burden of such care on the family. The desired concentration of such long-term care centers entails a significant staffing challenge, and potential staff must be willing to undergo extensive professional training, thus many such facilities may be understaffed. Elderly and disabled patients are free to roam the premises in such centers, but are prone to falls and accidents from which they may be unable to recover without assistance. In understaffed facilities, such accidents may not be immediately noticed, thus delaying treatment, potentially with severe consequences. Traditional Emergency System: To address this issue, hospitals have established panic button systems to summon medical staff. However, not all areas of a facility to which patients have access necessarily have panic buttons and, even when a panic button is nearby, someone other than the accident victim must be available to press it or help the victim. Class of Emergency System: Bastos et al. [1] reviewed the literature on the use of indoor positioning technologies for emergency response since 2004. Aside from comparing technology use and practices, they also classified each approach according to response requirements. Glanzer [2] suggested that, in general, personal and emergency response use require different levels of location precision, and reviewed most existing positioning technologies, categorizing them as for personal or emergency response use. In general, emergency response systems can be divided into two different types. In the first type, the response target waits passively for rescue while in the second s/he actively seeks assistance. Additional systems are designed for use by rescuers.