Elderly population in Japan is growing every year. By theyear 2020, it is expected that 30% of total population willbe above 65 years old. It is also expected that at least 10%of the elderly population need home-care services. Inorder to provide home-care and health-care to more than30% of the total population is challenging and needsbetter health-care and home-care planning, managementand services. One of the requirements to provide theservices is seamless location data. It is necessary to knowthe location of the patients, doctors, nurses, home-careservice providers (helpers) to provide the most effectiveservices. The location data should be reliable andaccurate.There are other technologies like WiFi, AGPS, MobilePhone Signal, RF Tags, UWB and motion sensors toprovide indoor position information. However, indoorlocation data from these signals are not reliable as theyvary with respect to time and mostly limited to 2-Dinformation. Time variable location data can’t be used inmedical and home-care services since decisions andservices have to be provided based on the location data.IMES has been selected for medical and home-careservices due to its reliability and availability of Floor IDin addition to 3-D location data. The IMES location datais also related with the Survey Department’s “LocationInformation Code”.The objective of this research is to develop a health-careand home-care service system based on indoor locationdata using IMES. It includes check-in services,monitoring of off-limit areas, monitoring of patients andmedical staffs, urgent and emergency calling andmanagement of home-care system. The system requiresmonitoring and management of human resources as wellas logistics with 3-D position information both indoors(latitude, longitude, floor ID) and outdoors (latitude,longitude, height) in seamless fashion.In this paper, IMES setup and testing in different premisesof the hospital and development of home-care systemusing android tablet are presented. The paper alsoincludes a comparison of results between IMES and otherindoor position systems (basically WiFi) to show theimportance of IMES for indoor position. The results showthe effectiveness of using IMES location data for healthcareand home-care services.
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