A dependents’ cooperative location network for behaviour analysis in public spaces

Abstract

Many dependents such as children, elderly or disabled people get lost or missing, but as dependents, they often lack the skills to protect themselves, and carers cannot keep their dependents in sight all of the time. Therefore, the challenge to be tackled in this paper is to develop a dependents’ cooperative location network over which carers could monitor the dependents’ positions in real time, giving them more freedom to safely roam within public spaces. Not only in open spaces such as crowded parks or streets, but also inside buildings such as city malls, museums or nursing homes. The aim of this paper is twofold, to create a cooperative and dynamic network of carers over which to monitor the position of their dependents by means of standardised technologies, and to understand how the physical environment could influence dependents’ activities by means of behavioural analysis in public spaces.