A vision-based system for automatic hand washing quality assessment

Abstract

Hand washing is a critical activity in preventing the spread of infection in health-care environments and food preparation areas. Several guidelines recommended a hand washing protocol consisting of six steps that ensure that all areas of the hands are thoroughly cleaned. In this paper, we describe a novel approach that uses a computer vision system to measure the user's hands motions to ensure that the hand washing guidelines are followed. A hand washing quality assessment system needs to know if the hands are joined or separated and it has to be robust to different lighting conditions, occlusions, reflections and changes in the color of the sink surface. This work presents three main contributions: a description of a system which delivers robust hands segmentation using a combination of color and motion analysis, a single multi-modal particle filter (PF) in combination with a k-means-based clustering technique to track both hands/arms, and the implementation of a multi-class classification of hand gestures using a support vector machine ensemble. PF performance is discussed and compared with a standard Kalman filter estimator. Finally, the global perfor-Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

Harmony: A Hand Wash Monitoring and Reminder System using Smart Watches

“…Most of the automated systems cannot measure the quality of a hand wash. A vision based technique to measure the quality of hand washes is presented in [11]. Each sink is equipped with a camera, and gestures of the hands are analyzed to measure the quality.…”

“…Though these automated systems can detect hand wash events, most of them cannot measure the duration and quality of the episodes. A vision based technique to monitor the quality of hand washes is presented in [11]. Cameras are placed on each sink to detect hand gestures.…”

Video analysis for identifying human operation difficulties and faucet usability assessment

“…Furthermore, the subtleties and variations in real-life scenarios are vast and identifying ''abnormal'' behavior is often insufficient for detecting dangerous situations or operation difficulties (see Section 3.5 for further discussion). Among other methods for analyzing videos of older adults and activities of daily living are the works of Matic et al [13] in identifying dressing failures and Llorca et al [14] in measuring the quality of handwashing and compliance with guidelines in clinical environments. Preliminary results from the work presented in this paper were reported earlier [9,15].…”

A Vision-based System for Hand Washing Quality Assessment with Real-Time Feedback

“…The problem of hand gesture recognition has been addressed by several authors in the last few years [9,10] and has been applied recently in a hand washing context [11]. In [12] a system is presented which uses gesture recognition for hand washing pose classification. Colour and motion analysis is used to segment the hands and arms.…”

“…In this work we describe an improved version of the system presented in [12]. Real-time feedback of the system guides the user sequentially through the hand washing procedure.…”