The Guardian Slippers: Designing an IoT Device to Enhance Safety for the Elderly in the Nursing Home

The rapid growth in the global elderly population and the declining number of the newborn brings about the burden of family caregiving for the elderly, resulting in the rising needs for the elderly to stay in a nursing home. Staying in the nursing home elevates the safety for the elderly. However, the caregivers in the nursing home are not able to pay full-time attention to every elderly due to the shortages of staff and their daily heavy work. It might lead to unexpected accidents happening to the elderly out of the caregivers’ sight and cause a delay for assistance. In addition, the family members of the elderly would like to be aware of the elderly’s health status to ensure the condition and living quality. In this paper, we present the design of The Guardian Slippers as an Internet connected slippers with pressure sensor and Bluetooth modules to estimate the elderly’s health status and report their current locations in the nursing home. We describe in detail how design is applied in relation to IoT, and how the Guardian Slippers support to construct a better caring environment between the elderly, caregivers, and family members. We discuss the subtleness of this design application, its practical usage in the indoor environment of the nursing home, and its challenges on the design aspect. Based on these discussions, we provide future designers a design direction on designing nursing home caring systems for the elderly.