Towards using tiny sensors with heat balancing criteria for child care reminders

Abstract

Raising children is challenging and requires lots of care. Parents always have to provide proper care to their children in time, like hydration and clothing. However, it is difficult to always stay alert or be aware of the care required at proper moments. One reason is that parents nowadays are busy. This especially applies to single parent, or the one who needs to raise multiple children.

This paper presents the use of an integrated multi-sensors together with a mobile application to help keep track of unusual situations concerning a child. By monitoring the changes in surrounding temperature, motions, and air pressure acquired from the sensors, our mobile application can infer the physiological needs of the children with the heat equilibrium assumption. As the thermal environment in the human body is mainly governed by the heat balance equation, we fuse all available sensor readings to the equation so as to estimate the change in situation of a child over a certain period of time. Our system can then notify the parents of the necessary care, including hydration, dining, clothing and ear barotrauma relieving. The proposed application can greatly relieve some of the mental load and pressure of the parents in taking care of children.