Modelling Human Activity Through Structural Vibrations with Alternate Computational Devices to Increase Cost Efficiency

Every event that occurs has a reaction, whether it be a pebble causing ripples in a pond or a bullet distressing a wall. Within a structure, these vibrations caused by a specific event in a medium can be measured with an accelerometer, and just as the vibrations caused by a bullet differ observably from those caused by a pebble, vibrations caused by walking vary from those caused by falling, running or jumping. To the eye, these differences are slight to severe, but when that signal is dissected, it is identifiably unique by its cause and location with extensive applications from home security to commercial monitoring of foot traffic to behavior analysis for medical care including fall detection. The focus of this study was to investigate how this signal is collected -- specifically, if a cheaper independent computer could replace a setup that currently costs thousands. The Raspberry Pi was used with an ADXL345 accelerometer as this alternate system. This study includes notes of development of the hardware and software as well as analysis of the developed system by comparison to the accepted system. The new system is enabled to continuously read the accelerometer’s z axis output value, maintaining a buffer and saving significant signals. These hypothesized capabilities were confirmed by collecting vibration data from the same impact and comparing how each system recorded the event

Fast and Robust Detection of Fallen People from a Mobile Robot

This paper deals with the problem of detecting fallen people lying on the floor by means of a mobile robot equipped with a 3D depth sensor. In the proposed algorithm, inspired by semantic segmentation techniques, the 3D scene is over-segmented into small patches. Fallen people are then detected by means of two SVM classifiers: the first one labels each patch, while the second one captures the spatial relations between them. This novel approach showed to be robust and fast. Indeed, thanks to the use of small patches, fallen people in real cluttered scenes with objects side by side are correctly detected. Moreover, the algorithm can be executed on a mobile robot fitted with a standard laptop making it possible to exploit the 2D environmental map built by the robot and the multiple points of view obtained during the robot navigation. Additionally, this algorithm is robust to illumination changes since it does not rely on RGB data but on depth data. All the methods have been thoroughly validated on the IASLAB-RGBD Fallen Person Dataset, which is published online as a further contribution. It consists of several static and dynamic sequences with 15 different people and 2 different environments

Resident Identification using Kinect Depth Image Data and Fuzzy Clustering Techniques

As a part of our passive fall risk assessment research in home environments, we present a method to identify older residents using features extracted from their gait information from a single depth camera. Depth images have been collected continuously for about eight months from several apartments at a senior housing facility. Shape descriptors such as bounding box information and image moments were extracted from silhouettes of the depth images. The features were then clustered using Possibilistic C Means for resident identification. This technology will allow researchers and health professionals to gather more information on the individual residents by filtering out data belonging to non-residents. Gait related information belonging exclusively to the older residents can then be gathered. The data can potentially help detect changes in gait patterns which can be used to analyze fall risk for elderly residents by passively observing them in their home environments

ANGELAH: A Framework for Assisting Elders At Home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both ”elder monitoring and emergency detection” solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed

A Study on Human Fall Detection Systems: Daily Activity Classification and Sensing Techniques

Fall detection for elderly is a major topic as far as assistive technologies are concerned. This is due to the high demand for the products and technologies related to fall detection with the ageing population around the globe. This paper gives a review of previous works on human fall detection devices and a preliminary results from a developing depth sensor based device. The three main approaches used in fall detection devices such as wearable based devices, ambient based devices and vision based devices are identified along with the sensors employed.  The frameworks and algorithms applied in each of the approaches and their uniqueness is also illustrated. After studying the performance and the shortcoming of the available systems a future solution using depth sensor is also proposed with preliminary results

Pengecaman peristiwa jatuh secara tiba-tiba menggunakan fitur gerakan dan pengelas ilhaman biologi sistem penglihatan

Kajian tentang pengecaman peristiwa yang berlaku secara tiba-tiba untuk sistem video pengawasan dikenal pasti boleh menyumbang ke arah pengurangan kos pembangunan teknologi sistem peranti pengesan bolehpakai dan juga ketidakselesaan pemakainya. Adalah dijangkakan, populasi penduduk dunia akan bertambah pada masa akan datang ekoran peningkatan jangka hayat manusia yang menyebabkan peningkatan bilangan penduduk dunia berumur 60 tahun ke atas. Oleh itu, sistem penjagaan keselamatan penghuni dalam rumah tak invasif yang boleh berfungsi untuk mengawas dan mengesan sebarang kejadian kemalangan yang tidak diingini seperti rebah, pengsan dan lain-lain akan menjadi penting dan berguna untuk warga tua khususnya untuk mereka yang tinggal bersendirian. Perkembangan dalam sistem pengecaman peristiwa yang berlaku secara tiba-tiba dijangkakan dapat menyediakan kemudahan kepada warga tua yang tinggal bersendirian di samping berupaya menjaga keselamatan mereka di rumah. Ini akan dapat mengurangkan kos perbelanjaan di pusat jagaan warga tua. Justeru, objektif utama kajian adalah untuk membangunkan satu kaedah mengesan gerakan dan mengecam peristiwa yang berlaku secara tiba-tiba dan memerlukan tindakan serta perhatian segera. Perlaksanaan pembangunan kaedah pengecaman kejadian melibatkan tiga langkah penting iaitu, pemprosesan awal, penyarian fitur dan pengelasan. Pemprosesan awal menggunakan teknik penolakan latar belakang (PLB) dan teknik pelicinan, (penuras kebarangkalian ruang, SPF dan sokongan data kejiranan, NDS) untuk mengurangkan hingar imej bebayang objek. Sifat gerakan telah dikenalpasti sebagai salah satu sifat yang penting dan relevan bagi mengesan perubahan mendadak pada orientasi, arah dan penampilan objek dalam sesebuah jujukan video. Terdapat tiga kaedah sarian fitur gerakan yang berasaskan ruang-masa iaitu templat, aliran vektor gerakan (AVG) dan ilhaman biologi sistem penglihatan manusia telah dilaksanakan. Seterusnya, keberkesanan fitur gerakan diuji dengan menggunakan tiga pengelas sedia ada iaitu k-kejiranan terdekat (k-NN), mesin vektor sokongan (SVM) dan rangkaian neural inspirasi biologi suap hadapan (BFFNN-P). Potensi pengelas BFFNN-P untuk mengelas peristiwa jatuh berbanding dengan aktiviti harian yang lain ditingkatkan melalui kaedah kawalan ralat berkadar (P), kamiran (I) dan terbitan (D). Hasil kajian yang diperolehi menunjukkan teknik SPF telah memberikan keputusan yang baik dalam mengurangkan hingar dan melicinkan imej bebayang objek. Fitur gerakan GaussH yang berasaskan inspirasi sistem penglihatan manusia telah memberikan keputusan yang lebih baik berbanding templat dan AVG dengan menggunakan pengelas BFFNN-PD. Prestasi kejituan, kepekaan dan kepekaan bagi fitur gerakan GaussH dengan pengelas BFFNN-PD adalah 98.6%, 98.2% dan 99.5%. Kesimpulannya, penyelidikan ini telah berjaya menghasilkan kaedah pengelasan melalui pendekatan inspirasi biologi yang mampu mengesan peristiwa yang berlaku secara tiba-tiba

Comparison and Characterization of Android-Based Fall Detection Systems

Falls are a foremost source of injuries and hospitalization for seniors. The adoption of automatic fall detection mechanisms can noticeably reduce the response time of the medical staff or caregivers when a fall takes place. Smartphones are being increasingly proposed as wearable, cost-effective and not-intrusive systems for fall detection. The exploitation of smartphones’ potential (and in particular, the Android Operating System) can benefit from the wide implantation, the growing computational capabilities and the diversity of communication interfaces and embedded sensors of these personal devices. After revising the state-of-the-art on this matter, this study develops an experimental testbed to assess the performance of different fall detection algorithms that ground their decisions on the analysis of the inertial data registered by the accelerometer of the smartphone. Results obtained in a real testbed with diverse individuals indicate that the accuracy of the accelerometry-based techniques to identify the falls depends strongly on the fall pattern. The performed tests also show the difficulty to set detection acceleration thresholds that allow achieving a good trade-off between false negatives (falls that remain unnoticed) and false positives (conventional movements that are erroneously classified as falls). In any case, the study of the evolution of the battery drain reveals that the extra power consumption introduced by the Android monitoring applications cannot be neglected when evaluating the autonomy and even the viability of fall detection systems.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2009-13763-C02-0