Artifacts' roaming beats recognition for estimating care activities in a nursing home

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to estimate the activity being performed by caregivers in a nursing home. The approach is based on information gathered from a workplace study conducted in a nursing home, in which 400 hours of detailed observation caregivers' activities were recorded. Automatic identification of objects based in composite correlation filters was implemented in order to generate a descriptive behavior of objects. When the behavior of the artifacts related with the activities is validated, the estimation of an activity is found. The activities estimated with a 92.72% of accuracy (on average) include hygiene, feeding and taking vital signs.

Activity Inference for Ambient Intelligence Through Handling Artifacts in a Healthcare Environment

“…This section introduces our framework named eStimating aCtivities based on Artifact’s behavior aNalysis (SCAN), for developing systems for activity inference. This framework employs the concept of RB for the behavior analysis of physical artifacts for activity inference [ 8 ]. This framework can be used as a comprehensive solution for the full process of activity inference by using different technologies, which is helpful for environments with AmI.…”

“…Figure 1 shows an example in a framework of the RB concept introduced in [ 8 ], which infers the activities based on the artifact’s behavior analysis. SCAN extends the RB concept by obtaining the representation using several technologies for activity inference.…”

“…To accomplish this, the RB concept is used. This concept was obtained through data analysis in a case study in a nursing home and is defined as follows: “The ability of an artifact to give a time stamp (hour and date) to change from motionless to a mobile state and change from the base location to any other” [ 8 ].…”

“…A practical case is presented in this section as a result of the case study made and presented in [ 8 ]. The purpose of the case study was to characterize activities that caregivers performed in providing healthcare of elders with restricted mobility (ERM) in a nursing home.…”

“…Integral to this framework, we show how our concept of the roaming beat (RB) [8] is obtained from distinct technologies within a healthcare environment, where the RB represents a set of images in a time span obtained by artifact-behavior when an activity is performed; it allows us to recover several kinds of context from the setting such as identity, location, time and activity based on the analysis of artifact behavior, and the RB concept allows activity representation to be useful for: Incorporating several technologies for capturing the artifacts behavior.Representing and understanding artifacts behavior to perform an activity.Activity inference based on the artifacts manipulation, and solving the challenge of activity recognition.Implementing systems that allow the activity monitoring and information recovery of a scenario via images or video segments.…”