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Countries are experiencing a global population ageing. It is estimated that the percentage of third age people will notably increase in next decades, implying a difficult challenge to society. Rural areas are the most affected locations by these conditions. Currently, small vil- lages are facing an increasing ageing of population where almost 40% of inhabitants are over 65. Medical needs are one of the most relevant aspects in this context. This factor, in conjunction with other reasons such as loneliness, motivates technological solutions. Despite this, Inter- net is not accessible from rural and low income areas, due to the lack of interest from the operator side to invest in these locations. In this paper, an opportunistic routing solution based on BLE is proposed, with the aim of monitoring loneliness population in order to detect potential emergencies.

There are contexts where TCP/IP is not suitable for performing data transmission due to long delays, timeouts, network partitioning, and interruptions. In these scenarios, mobile opportunistic networks (MONs) are a valid option, providing asynchronous transmissions in dynamic topologies. These architectures exploit physical encounters and persistent storage to communicate nodes that lack a continuous end-to-end path. In recent years, many routing algorithms have been based on social interactions. Smartphones and wearables are in vogue, applying social information to optimize paths between nodes. This work proposes Refine Social Broadcast (RSB), a social routing algorithm. RSB uses social behavior and node interests to refine the message broadcast in the network, improving the delivery probability while reducing redundant data duplication. The proposal combines the identification of the most influential nodes to carry the information toward the destination with interest-based routing. To evaluate the performance, RSB is applied to a simulated case of use based on a realistic loneliness detection methodology in elderly adults. The obtained delivery probability, latency, overhead, and hops are compared with the most popular social-based routers, namely, EpSoc, SimBet, and BubbleRap. RSB manifests a successful delivery probability, exceeding the second-best result (SimBet) by 17% and reducing the highest overhead (EpSoc) by 97%.

There are contexts where communication with TCP/IP protocol is not possible due to the lack of infrastructure or a reliable and continuous data transmission. In this cases, alternatives such as Opportunistic Networks (OPPNets) are valid. Such challenging conditions are common in rural areas and are a significant obstacle for the deployment of eHealth technologies for older adults. Considering this context, the present work introduces Interest-based System for Communication in Isolated Areas (ISCA), an OPPNet architecture for remote monitoring and emergency detection in ageing people who live alone. For this, the energetic requirements are considered, providing efficient and sustainable operation. The proposal makes use of a routing algorithm based on interests which enables asynchronous communication among entities. ISCA is evaluated over a realistic scenario and compared with similar state-of-the-art solutions. Experimental results show that ISCA notably improves the delivery probability with an enhancement of 52.25% in comparison to the second best alternative and provides a suitable average latency. Moreover, it also achieves better performance in terms of overhead and hops number compared to the other studied protocols.