This paper proposes body posture recognition and turning recording system for assisting the care of bed bound patients in nursing homes. The system continuously detects the patient's body posture and records the length of time for each body posture. If the patient remains in the same body posture long enough to develop pressure ulcers, the system notifies caregivers to change the patient's body posture. The objective of recording is to provide the log of body turning for querying of patients' family members. In order to accurately detect patient's body posture, we developed a novel pressure sensing pad which contains force sensing resistor sensors. Based on the proposed pressure sensing pad, we developed a bed posture recognition module which includes a bed posture recognition algorithm. The algorithm is based on fuzzy theory. The body posture recognition algorithm can detect the patient's bed posture whether it is right lateral decubitus, left lateral decubitus, or supine. The detected information of patient's body posture can be then transmitted to the server of healthcare center by the communication module to perform the functions of recording and notification. Experimental results showed that the average posture recognition accuracy for our proposed module is 92%.
Indoor localization is used in many applications like security, healthcare, location based services, and social networking. Fingerprinting-based methods are widely used for indoor localization. But received signal strength (RSS) variation due to device diversity and change of conditions in the localization environment (e.g., distribution of furniture, people presence and movement, and opening and closing of doors) induce a significant localization error. To overcome this, we propose a hybrid indoor localization system using radio frequency (RF) and pyroelectric infrared (PIR) sensors. Our localization system has two stages. In the first stage, the zone of the target person is identified by PIR sensors. In the second stage, we apply K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) algorithm to the fingerprints within the zone identified and estimate position. Zone based processing of fingerprints will exclude deviated fingerprints because of RSS variation. We proposed two localization methods: Proposed 1 and Proposed 2 which use signal strength difference (SSD) and RSS, respectively. Simulation results show that the 0.8-meter accuracy of Proposed 1 achieves 84% and Proposed 2 achieves 65%, while traditional fingerprinting and SSD are 46% and 28%, respectively.
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