IoT Technologies for Active Ageing: an Overview of the Elderly Dehydration Case

Dehydration is a condition that involves severe complications for the health status of a subject and could cause death if not timely compensated, especially in the elderly. While such a state is one of the primary causes for elderly patients hospitalization, this paper tries to identify a general structure of a wearable device in charge of continuously monitoring the hydration level of the user, in order to identify possible critical conditions and noticing in real time the occurrence of this situation to caregivers. To this aim, this paper reviews the state of the art in terms of wearable sensing devices, processing techniques and data transmission technologies: the available sensing techniques are discussed analyzing their applicability in the context of low power wearable devices. Similarly, the performances of the most common Internet of Things (IoT)-based data transmission technologies are presented focusing on their usability in this specific context. While no unique solution can be identified, the outcomes of this paper can be exploited for the definition of different typologies of devices according to specific operating conditions. This represents a fundamental starting point required for the development of a fully operating device to be tested and employed in a real application scenario.