Unobtrusive Monitoring the Daily Activity Routine of Elderly People Living Alone, with Low-Cost Binary Sensors

Abstract

Most expert projections indicate that in 2030, there will be over one billion people aged 60 or over. The vast majority of them prefer to spend their last years at home, and almost a third of them live alone. This creates a growing need for technology-based solutions capable of helping older people to live independently in their places. Despite the wealth of solutions proposed for this general problem, there are very few support systems that can be reproduced on a larger scale. In this study, we propose a method to monitor the activity of the elderly living alone and detect deviations from the previous activity patterns based on the idea that the residential living environment can be modeled as a collection of behaviorally significant places located arbitrarily in a generic space. Then we use virtual pheromones—a concept defined in our previous work—to create images of the pheromone distribution maps, which describe the spatiotemporal evolution of the interactions between the user and the environment. We propose a method to detect deviations from the activity routines based on a simple statistical analysis of the resulting images. By applying this method on two public activity recognition datasets, we found that the system is capable of detecting both singular deviations and slow-deviating trends from the previous activity routine of the monitored persons.

Smart Environments and Social Robots for Age-Friendly Integrated Care Services

“…Ambient temperature, usage time duration of an equipment, Toilet-usage frequency [14,38,51,52] Contact sensors, magnetic switch Open/close the office desk, open/close the TV, open doors, windows, etc. [14,38,52] Sleep quality is an important factor for a person's stage of health because it reduces the risk of developing chronic diseases and mental disorders.…”

“…Ambient temperature, usage time duration of an equipment, Toilet-usage frequency [14,38,51,52] Contact sensors, magnetic switch Open/close the office desk, open/close the TV, open doors, windows, etc. [14,38,52] Sleep quality is an important factor for a person's stage of health because it reduces the risk of developing chronic diseases and mental disorders. Most state-of-the-art approaches for monitoring sleep quality focus on comparative analyses and evaluation of the commercial devices available on the market [21,22,30], while only some of them present academic research solutions [20,23,31].…”

“…The monitored infrastructure integrates the following types of non-wearable heterogeneous sensing units installed in the older adult's houses: (i) movement sensors, (ii) electronics and electrical devices monitoring sensors placed on the electrical and electronic appliances, (iii) toilet sensors, (iv) contact sensors to monitor the opening/ closing of a door, office desk or and self-grooming table and (v) force sensors placed on sofa /bed/ armchair to monitor the sleeping or sitting activities. In [38] the solution proposed for detecting the deviation from the daily activity routine of older adults is based on a non-intrusive monitoring infrastructure consisting of low-cost sensors such as passive infrared (PIR) motion detectors and magnetic door contacts sensors located in each rooms of the house. The monitored data contains information about the older adults' lifestyle and is used to detect unusual activities performed by an older adult in a day or deviations from his previous routine.…”

A Vision-Based System for Monitoring Elderly People at Home

“…Several surveys in the literature describe recent trends in smart homes aimed at assisted living systems [6][7][8][9]. These monitoring systems can use exclusively ambient sensors (i.e., RGB and/or infrared cameras) to limit user discomfort as much as possible [10][11][12], can use wearable sensors if health parameters need to be monitored [13], or can exploit different modalities at the same time [6][7][8].…”

Challenges of Regional Development in the Context of Population Ageing. Analysis Based on the Example of Opolskie Voivodeship

“…On the other hand, tele-medicine, tele-monitoring, and other technologies can affect the quality of life of elderly people and offer medical support in situations of poor transport accessibility. It is especially vital in the case of elderly people who live alone [83], especially in the situation when, as studies show, most elderly grown-ups prefer an independent life in their own house [84]. Therefore, it is a significant challenge to create senior-friendly districts thanks to which elderly people do not live feeling isolated and lonely [85].…”