A Survey on the Internet of Things Solutions for the Elderly and Disabled: Applications, Prospects, and Challenges

Advances in technology has not only led to the start of innovative solutions and new business opportunities in different sectors but also reduced manpower needs and operational costs. Furthermore, the quality of provided services has been improved. Therefore, recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a great momentum as a key enabling technology for a wide range of health care applications, especially for the elderly and disabled. Although, solutions based on IoT technology have started to support the elderly and disabled in many areas of their life and work and the IoT helps improve quality of life for the elderly and disabled, the amount of data collected by the IoT has increased tremendously and surpassed the expectations. This makes it necessary to investigate approaches and solutions in order to efficiently utilise large amounts of data, especially in health care applications. In this paper, we are first going to review existing approaches and IoT solutions specifically proposed and designed for the elderly and disabled. Then, we are going to investigate prospects and research challenges in the use of the IoT in the services designed for elderly people and people with disabilities to provide an insight into future research opportunities. Index Terms – The Internet of Things, Elderly people, People with disabilities, Research challenges, Future research directions.