TCS takes “Care Seniors” IoT Solution to the Next Level with AWS & Intel

Tata Consultancy Services’ enterprise grade, multi-tenant IoT platform, TCS Connected Universe Platform (TCUP), hosted on AWS Cloud and powered by Intel hardware, provides personalized care to Singapore’s aging community and is set to be rolled out across the globe as part of major future smart city initiatives to benefit society. A leading global multinational IT conglomerate with over $25 billion in annual revenue, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a world leader in the rapidly maturing Internet of Things (IoT) technology segment and services. While still in its relative infancy, IoT is rapidly becoming a major enabler of business process efficiency. However, without the right platform behind it, IoT solutions can potentially become just as complex as the problems they’re supposed to solve.

Two key TCS collaborations have helped underpin the success of building and delivering its customer IoT and cloud solutions—Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Intel. Some of these solutions—like the remote non-intrusive assisted living solutions for the elderly population highlighted in this case study—are beginning to have an enormous positive societal impact. While this TCS solution, powered by AWS and Intel, increases the quality of life and care for senior citizens, it is also becoming a powerful foundation and example for further development in the fast emerging IoT-enabled services. 

TCS and AWS have formed a trusted collaboration to deliver proven results to thousands of businesses worldwide, as they develop and transform their cloud strategies. AWS and TCS provide a suite of offerings including cloud advisory services, strategy and roadmap definition, assessment, deployment and implementation, workload migration, and managed services—spanning public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Together, TCS and AWS blueprint the cloud migration journey, accelerating the discovery and assessment phase with intelligent mapping of products and services based on a simple data-capture matrix.

TCS and Intel have enjoyed a go-to-market relationship since 2017.  This collaboration accelerates building “future reference architectures” spanning a breadth of technologies, including IoT, cloud, networks, 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data center infrastructure management to help meet the rapidly evolving digital transformation requirements of global markets. TCS solutions are based on Intel technologies such as Intel® Xeon® Processors, 11th-Gen Intel® Core™ processors, Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory, Intel® Optane™ SSDs, and Artificial Intelligence. Coupled with TCS’ full services digital expertise, the collaboration delivers business value by advancing customers’ Edge to Core to Cloud digital transformations.

Developing IoT applications at scale and deploying them securely remains a significant challenge, especially when it involves interoperability and integration with existing IT infrastructure. The TCS Connected Universe Platform (TCUP) is designed to address multiple needs in one solution. Utilising AWS cloud services powered by Intel microprocessors, TCUP helps organizations develop, deploy, and manage IoT applications securely and painlessly. TCUP data management involves the collection, processing and storage of IoT data from a range of disparate sources, enabling real-time processing for alerts, notifications, and automated decision-making. This innovative IoT platform can benefit industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, transport, logistics, and the public sector, among others.

One such initiative TCUP has successfully collaborated on with AWS and Intel is for an IoT monitoring service for Singapore’s senior citizens. The project, called Care Seniors – Assisted Living for Elderly, is a Singapore government program, and a joint initiative between TCS and the Singapore Management University (SMU). With a large aging population, managing costs is difficult and the Singapore government wanted technology-driven services that could monitor the well-being of elderly citizens who prefer to continue living in their own homes. The challenge was in finding a way to monitor the elderly to be able to provide care while allowing them to live as independently as possible. That led to the ideation of a non-intrusive solution that could track, trace, and monitor senior citizens remotely. 

Based on real-time data captured from sensors, Care Seniors is able to construct an accurate digital footprint of each individual. Community caregivers use a specially designed app interface to access the health and motion data and upload updates; they can also collaborate with other caregivers through the app. The solution doesn’t require residents to feed in any information manually. Daily activities are closely mapped by motion sensors, door sensors, and medication box sensors, and an event is generated based on periods of movement, rest, and ingestion of medication. Any anomalous pattern observed raises an alert for the caregiver community who can then act on it and provide the necessary support. By integrating a range of real-time data inputs, the Care Seniors project can contextualize a variety of important indicators, which contribute to a more dependable and nuanced aged care sector. This project is a great example of how technology can help man and machine work together for the greater good of society. 

Data from the edge including sensor inputs are ingested into the AWS IOT Core and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for long term persistence. AWS Lambda and Amazon MQ services enable the integration of real-time streaming data into the TCUP Core Services. This is deployed using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), allowing for a highly scalable micro services-driven architecture that is light and efficient, and delivers actionable insights with minimal latencies.

Some of the major TCUP services deployed on Amazon EKS include the following: Event Service, Task Service, Workflow Service, ML/DL Notebook Service, Real-Time-Complex-Event Processing Service, Complex Data Processing Service, Notification Service, User and Admin Portals. Complex data processing is executed using SPARK, leveraged from Amazon Elastic MapReduced (Amazon EMR). Stateful negotiations are built over Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

Powered by Intel processors, Amazon EKS is employed to create host-clusters for the TCUP Care Seniors workloads, which as General Purpose, Computer Optimized, and Memory Optimized. The Memory Optimized workloads execute on R5 based instances. These instances are based on 3.1 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake), with 8:1 GiB to vCPU offers up to 25Gbps NW bandwidth. R5d instances include up to 3.6 TB of local NVMe SSD. The Compute Optimized workloads execute on C5 based instances. These instances are based on 3.1 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake), with 2:1 GiB to vCPU up to 25Gbps NW bandwidth and supports AVX 512. Finally, the General-Purpose workloads execute on M5 based instances. These instances are based on 3.1 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake), with 4:1 GiB to vCPU. 

The Care Seniors project, which started with a Singapore government grant for TCS-SMU’s iCity Lab, has since been successfully trialled in Ireland and the UK, and is likely to feature in the smart cities of the future. The Care Seniors project-powered by TCUP has been instrumental in delivering the right personalized care to each individual senior citizen with a user-friendly interface, reducing the number of unnecessary medical interventions such as hospital visits. As a result of this innovative solution to aged care, volunteers and caregivers are able to quickly address challenges and issues faced by the older members of society. To date, the solution has detected a number of true emergency alerts activated by the elderly who have received timely assistance because of the solution, processing a staggering 31 million data points, including true frailty detection of over 90 percent, and depression detection of over 90 percent.

• 10 true emergency alerts activated by elderly receiving timely assistance
• 75% ‘Inactivity Assistance’ rendered to elderly activated by the system
• As high as 14% of the seniors are socially isolated
• True Frailty Detection: More than 90% accuracy
• Social Isolation Detection: More than 90% accuracy

• Personalized care – Living pattern for each person stored and analysed to help teams deliver the right care with minimal intrusion
• Lower cost – Technology supporting cost reduction maximizing one-to-one care, minimizing human intervention
• Connected living – Houses, doors, medication boxes, neighbourhood caregiver volunteer – all connected through an integrated platform
• Easy-to-use applications for caregiver users on the ground to better serve elderly who are living in isolation; simple and easy interface for users
• Last mile human touch – Volunteers and caregivers can quickly address elderly needs with human connection