Detecting wandering behavior based on GPS traces for elders with dementia

Abstract

International audienceWandering is among the most frequent, problematic, and dangerous behaviors for elders with dementia. Frequent wanderers likely suffer falls and fractures, which affect the safety and quality of their lives. In order to monitor outdoor wandering of elderly people with dementia, this paper proposes a real-time method for wandering detection based on individuals' GPS traces. By representing wandering traces as loops, the problem of wandering detection is transformed into detecting loops in elders' mobility trajectories. Specifically, the raw GPS data is first preprocessed to remove noisy and crowded points by performing an online mean shift clustering. A novel method called θ_WD is then presented that is able to detect loop-like traces on the fly. The experimental results on the GPS datasets of several elders have show that the θ_WD method is effective and efficient in detecting wandering behaviors, in terms of detection performance (AUC > 0.99, and 90% detection rate with less than 5 % of the false alarm rate), as well as time complexit

On the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease from multimodal signals: A survey

“…Examples of automatic assessment of agitation in dementia include the work of Fook et al [291] which aim at measuring it with video streams, or the one by Bankole et al [292] where the use of body sensors was purposed instead of cameras. In the case of wondering detection, steps have already been given so as to detect it using activity recognition techniques in wireless sensor networks [293], as said before, by means of GPS tracking systems [294] and also by using RFID tags and antennas to track the walking patterns and ADLs [295] of the patients.…”

Activity tracking and monitoring of patients with alzheimer’s disease

“…Similarly, in [43], a system called Escort, was introduced to locate the patients and generate alert messages in cases when they were out of the defined regions. In [22], methods were proposed for detecting wandering behavior based on GPS traces for elderly with dementia. In the proposed methods, it identified the loop-like traces of movements of the users on the fly.…”

An Integrated Service Platform for Pervasive Elderly Care

“…One of the earliest works is the University of Washington's Opportunity Knock system [15], which tracks a person's movement and finds potentially erroneous behavior based on a transportation mode learned from users' history. In addition, unsafe wandering behavior was also explored in our previous work [16], which is realized via detecting invalid movement patterns when elders travel alone in outdoor environments.…”