Although the level of welfare service for the elder increased with the increase in the number of the elder, it still did not reached a level to meet the welfare demands of the elder. Especially the official service for solitary senior citizens is very insufficient. Therefore various social measures for solitary senior citizens are emerging as a policy assignment, and the introduction of u-Care system in light of at-home welfare by which the elder can receive welfare service in routine life is being emphasized escaping from existing unified facility welfare service.
The past research on the u-Care system, which is a ubiquitous-based service to help solitary senior citizens directly in the emergency, has a deficiency in system embodiment. Although the number of beneficiaries of u-Care system is increasing by regions and stages since 2007, the speed of expansion is slow due to the budget constraint.
The communication between gateway and server is accomplished by data communication using the telephone network in existing systems. Although it was the most universal communicating way at that time, diverse communicating methods such as ZigBee can be used nowadays because of the rapid change in communication infrastructure or technology. To relax the budget constraint by reducing communication fee for operating or using the intelligent home system, the change of the communicating method should be considered. If not, the cost remains as a big obstacle for service expansion.
This research, therefore, is to analyze processes of the ubiquitous-based intelligent home system for solitary senior citizens actually run by City_A for 3 years. In order to make the system more user-oriented, user-friendly, efficient, and cost effective, we have contacted user groups and surveyed the requests. Based on the analysis results of the survey, this research is to propose a new configuration for the intelligent home system by using ZigBee specification instead of telephone network. Although it may be difficult to resolve all problems in the existing home system, we hope the suggestion of this research is helpful to build a new intelligent home system for solitary senior citizens.