| Summary: | As populations age, there is a growing need for the establishment and staffing of care centers, but the supply of such facilities is not keeping pace with demand. Existing hospitals, care centers, and other institutions currently provide care for many physically disabled and elderly patients. For these patients to go outside in the fresh air, they must necessarily leave their designated care areas, but this poses a risk of falls and other accidents, which can be particularly challenging to prevent or respond to the given staffing limitations. Such incidents can cause further physical and mental deterioration. Many studies have sought to minimize rescue response times by first establishing the incident location before alerting staff to respond. However, this approach does not guarantee minimized response times. This paper proposes an approach to allow medical staff to quickly arrive at the scene of an accident with patients and staff using mobile devices to automatically alert a central server of their current locations. In response to an accident notification, the server immediately alerts medical staff in closest proximity to the incident to respond, with the staff devices providing clear directions to reach the patient in distress, thus minimizing response times. The proposed system can operate while maintaining security and patient information privacy, including the data integrity, anonymity, authentication, location confidentiality, location unforgeability, and resistance to asynchronous and tracking attacks, and is implemented on Android smart phones. The proposed system can be used in homes, hospitals, care centers, or any other venue offering long-term care. This proposal is the first such real-time and automated emergency rescue alert system to provide both information privacy and authentication.
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