Activity Analysis, Summarization, and Visualization for Indoor Human Activity Monitoring

DOI 10.1109/TCSVT.2008.2005612In this work, we study how continuous video monitoring and intelligent video processing can be used in eldercare to assist the independent living of elders and to improve the efficiency of eldercare practice. More specifically, we develop an automated activity analysis and summarization for eldercare video monitoring. At the object level, we construct an advanced silhouette extraction, human detection and tracking algorithm for indoor environments. At the feature level, we develop an adaptive learning method to estimate the physical location and moving speed of a person from a single camera view without calibration. At the action level, we explore hierarchical decision tree and dimension reduction methods for human action recognition. We extract important ADL (activities of daily living) statistics for automated functional assessment. To test and evaluate the proposed algorithms and methods, we deploy the camera system in a real living environment for about a month and have collected more than 200 hours (in excess of 600 G bytes) of activity monitoring videos. Our extensive tests over these massive video datasets demonstrate that the proposed automated activity analysis system is very efficient.This work was supported in part by National Institute of Health under Grant 5R21AG026412

Automated Estimation of Elder Activity Levels from Anonymized Video Data

Significant declines in quality of life for elders in assisted living communities are typically triggered by health events. Given the necessary information, such events can often be predicted, and thus, be avoided or reduced in severity. Statistics on activities of daily living and activity level over an extended period of time provide important data for functional assessment and health prediction. However, persistent activity monitoring and continuous collection of this type of data is extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. In this work, we propose a method for automated estimation of activity levels based on silhouettes segmented from video data, and subsequent extraction of higher order information from the silhouettes. By building a regression model from this higher order information, our system can automatically estimate elder activity levels

First Steps towards a Recognition of ADLs with Radio Modules

Abstract-The paper describes a system, designed for unsupervised detecting and recording the activities of daily living (ADL) of patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) without human observation. Many miniaturized, radio linked and mobile µC-based tags are used. Some are fixed to objects others are carried by the patients. All tags have a limited and adjustable communication range. Basic concept is to detect, to record and to analyze the combinations of µC-tags. This paper deals especially with a first user interface to evaluate the ADL of a patient as well as an evaluation of our system over several days for some activities with a sensitivity of 92%. This is the last step before entering a clinical environment

Towards automatic activity classification and movement assessment during a sports training session

Abstract—Motion analysis technologies have been widely used to monitor the potential for injury and enhance athlete perfor- mance. However, most of these technologies are expensive, can only be used in laboratory environments and examine only a few trials of each movement action. In this paper, we present a novel ambulatory motion analysis framework using wearable inertial sensors to accurately assess all of an athlete’s activities in real training environment. We firstly present a system that automatically classifies a large range of training activities using the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in conjunction with a Random forest classifier. The classifier is capable of successfully classifying various activities with up to 98% accuracy. Secondly, a computationally efficient gradient descent algorithm is used to estimate the relative orientations of the wearable inertial sensors mounted on the shank, thigh and pelvis of a subject, from which the flexion-extension knee and hip angles are calculated. These angles, along with sacrum impact accelerations, are automatically extracted for each stride during jogging. Finally, normative data is generated and used to determine if a subject’s movement technique differed to the normative data in order to identify potential injury related factors. For the joint angle data this is achieved using a curve-shift registration technique. It is envisaged that the proposed framework could be utilized for accurate and automatic sports activity classification and reliable movement technique evaluation in various unconstrained environments for both injury management and performance enhancement

Controlador inteligente para ahorro de energía por detección de rutinas

Ingeniero (a) ElectrónicoPregrad

Leveraging Smartphone Sensor Data for Human Activity Recognition

Using smartphones for human activity recognition (HAR) has a wide range of applications including healthcare, daily fitness recording, and anomalous situations alerting. This study focuses on human activity recognition based on smartphone embedded sensors. The proposed human activity recognition system recognizes activities including walking, running, sitting, going upstairs, and going downstairs. Embedded sensors (a tri-axial accelerometer and a gyroscope sensor) are employed for motion data collection. Both time-domain and frequency-domain features are extracted and analyzed. Our experiment results show that time-domain features are good enough to recognize basic human activities. The system is implemented in an Android smartphone platform. While the focus has been on human activity recognition systems based on a supervised learning approach, an incremental clustering algorithm is investigated. The proposed unsupervised (clustering) activity detection scheme works in an incremental manner, which contains two stages. In the first stage, streamed sensor data will be processed. A single-pass clustering algorithm is used to generate pre-clustered results for the next stage. In the second stage, pre-clustered results will be refined to form the final clusters, which means the clusters are built incrementally by adding one cluster at a time. Experiments on smartphone sensor data of five basic human activities show that the proposed scheme can get comparable results with traditional clustering algorithms but working in a streaming and incremental manner. In order to develop more accurate activity recognition systems independent of smartphone models, effects of sensor differences across various smartphone models are investigated. We present the impairments of different smartphone embedded sensor models on HAR applications. Outlier removal, interpolation, and filtering in pre-processing stage are proposed as mitigating techniques. Based on datasets collected from four distinct smartphones, the proposed mitigating techniques show positive effects on 10-fold cross validation, device-to-device validation, and leave-one-out validation. Improved performance for smartphone based human activity recognition is observed. With the efforts of developing human activity recognition systems based on supervised learning approach, investigating a clustering based incremental activity recognition system with its potential applications, and applying techniques for alleviating sensor difference effects, a robust human activity recognition system can be trained in either supervised or unsupervised way and can be adapted to multiple devices with being less dependent on different sensor specifications

A Fuzzy Logic-Based System for Soccer Video Scenes Classification

Massive global video surveillance worldwide captures data but lacks detailed activity information to flag events of interest, while the human burden of monitoring video footage is untenable. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to raw video footage to identify and extract required information and summarize it in linguistic formats. Video summarization automation usually involves text-based data such as subtitles, segmenting text and semantics, with little attention to video summarization in the processing of video footage only. Classification problems in recorded videos are often very complex and uncertain due to the dynamic nature of the video sequence and light conditions, background, camera angle, occlusions, indistinguishable scene features, etc. Video scene classification forms the basis of linguistic video summarization, an open research problem with major commercial importance. Soccer video scenes present added challenges due to specific objects and events with similar features (e.g. “people” include audiences, coaches, and players), as well as being constituted from a series of quickly changing and dynamic frames with small inter-frame variations. There is an added difficulty associated with the need to have light weight video classification systems working in real time with massive data sizes. In this thesis, we introduce a novel system based on Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Classification Systems (IT2FLCS) whose parameters are optimized by the Big Bang–Big Crunch (BB-BC) algorithm, which allows for the automatic scenes classification using optimized rules in broadcasted soccer matches video. The type-2 fuzzy logic systems would be unequivocal to present a highly interpretable and transparent model which is very suitable for the handling the encountered uncertainties in video footages and converting the accumulated data to linguistic formats which can be easily stored and analysed. Meanwhile the traditional black box techniques, such as support vector machines (SVMs) and neural networks, do not provide models which could be easily analysed and understood by human users. The BB-BC optimization is a heuristic, population-based evolutionary approach which is characterized by the ease of implementation, fast convergence and low computational cost. We employed the BB-BC to optimize our system parameters of fuzzy logic membership functions and fuzzy rules. Using the BB-BC we are able to balance the system transparency (through generating a small rule set) together with increasing the accuracy of scene classification. Thus, the proposed fuzzy-based system allows achieving relatively high classification accuracy with a small number of rules thus increasing the system interpretability and allowing its real-time processing. The type-2 Fuzzy Logic Classification System (T2FLCS) obtained 87.57% prediction accuracy in the scene classification of our testing group data which is better than the type-1 fuzzy classification system and neural networks counterparts. The BB-BC optimization algorithms decrease the size of rule bases both in T1FLCS and T2FLCS; the T2FLCS finally got 85.716% with reduce rules, outperforming the T1FLCS and neural network counterparts, especially in the “out-of-range data” which validates the T2FLCSs capability to handle the high level of faced uncertainties. We also presented a novel approach based on the scenes classification system combined with the dynamic time warping algorithm to implement the video events detection for real world processing. The proposed system could run on recorded or live video clips and output a label to describe the event in order to provide the high level summarization of the videos to the user

Development of a simulation tool for measurements and analysis of simulated and real data to identify ADLs and behavioral trends through statistics techniques and ML algorithms

openCon una popolazione di anziani in crescita, il numero di soggetti a rischio di patologia è in rapido aumento. Molti gruppi di ricerca stanno studiando soluzioni pervasive per monitorare continuamente e discretamente i soggetti fragili nelle loro case, riducendo i costi sanitari e supportando la diagnosi medica. Comportamenti anomali durante l'esecuzione di attività di vita quotidiana (ADL) o variazioni sulle tendenze comportamentali sono di grande importanza.With a growing population of elderly people, the number of subjects at risk of pathology is rapidly increasing. Many research groups are studying pervasive solutions to continuously and unobtrusively monitor fragile subjects in their homes, reducing health-care costs and supporting the medical diagnosis. Anomalous behaviors while performing activities of daily living (ADLs) or variations on behavioral trends are of great importance. To measure ADLs a significant number of parameters need to be considering affecting the measurement such as sensors and environment characteristics or sensors disposition. To face the impossibility to study in the real context the best configuration of sensors able to minimize costs and maximize accuracy, simulation tools are being developed as powerful means. This thesis presents several contributions on this topic. In the following research work, a study of a measurement chain aimed to measure ADLs and represented by PIRs sensors and ML algorithm is conducted and a simulation tool in form of Web Application has been developed to generate datasets and to simulate how the measurement chain reacts varying the configuration of the sensors. Starting from eWare project results, the simulation tool has been thought to provide support for technicians, developers and installers being able to speed up analysis and monitoring times, to allow rapid identification of changes in behavioral trends, to guarantee system performance monitoring and to study the best configuration of the sensors network for a given environment. The UNIVPM Home Care Web App offers the chance to create ad hoc datasets related to ADLs and to conduct analysis thanks to statistical algorithms applied on data. To measure ADLs, machine learning algorithms have been implemented in the tool. Five different tasks have been identified. To test the validity of the developed instrument six case studies divided into two categories have been considered. To the first category belong those studies related to: 1) discover the best configuration of the sensors keeping environmental characteristics and user behavior as constants; 2) define the most performant ML algorithms. The second category aims to proof the stability of the algorithm implemented and its collapse condition by varying user habits. Noise perturbation on data has been applied to all case studies. Results show the validity of the generated datasets. By maximizing the sensors network is it possible to minimize the ML error to 0.8%. Due to cost is a key factor in this scenario, the fourth case studied considered has shown that minimizing the configuration of the sensors it is possible to reduce drastically the cost with a more than reasonable value for the ML error around 11.8%. Results in ADLs measurement can be considered more than satisfactory.INGEGNERIA INDUSTRIALEopenPirozzi, Michel

An IoT based Virtual Coaching System (VSC) for Assisting Activities of Daily Life

Nowadays aging of the population is becoming one of the main concerns of theworld. It is estimated that the number of people aged over 65 will increase from 461million to 2 billion in 2050. This substantial increment in the elderly population willhave significant consequences in the social and health care system. Therefore, in thecontext of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has beenemerging as a new research area to address problems related to the aging of the population. AAL technologies based on embedded devices have demonstrated to be effectivein alleviating the social- and health-care issues related to the continuous growing of theaverage age of the population. Many smart applications, devices and systems have beendeveloped to monitor the health status of elderly, substitute them in the accomplishment of activities of the daily life (especially in presence of some impairment or disability),alert their caregivers in case of necessity and help them in recognizing risky situations.Such assistive technologies basically rely on the communication and interaction be-tween body sensors, smart environments and smart devices. However, in such contextless effort has been spent in designing smart solutions for empowering and supportingthe self-efficacy of people with neurodegenerative diseases and elderly in general. Thisthesis fills in the gap by presenting a low-cost, non intrusive, and ubiquitous VirtualCoaching System (VCS) to support people in the acquisition of new behaviors (e.g.,taking pills, drinking water, finding the right key, avoiding motor blocks) necessary tocope with needs derived from a change in their health status and a degradation of theircognitive capabilities as they age. VCS is based on the concept of extended mind intro-duced by Clark and Chalmers in 1998. They proposed the idea that objects within theenvironment function as a part of the mind. In my revisiting of the concept of extendedmind, the VCS is composed of a set of smart objects that exploit the Internet of Things(IoT) technology and machine learning-based algorithms, in order to identify the needsof the users and react accordingly. In particular, the system exploits smart tags to trans-form objects commonly used by people (e.g., pillbox, bottle of water, keys) into smartobjects, it monitors their usage according to their needs, and it incrementally guidesthem in the acquisition of new behaviors related to their needs. To implement VCS, thisthesis explores different research directions and challenges. First of all, it addresses thedefinition of a ubiquitous, non-invasive and low-cost indoor monitoring architecture byexploiting the IoT paradigm. Secondly, it deals with the necessity of developing solu-tions for implementing coaching actions and consequently monitoring human activitiesby analyzing the interaction between people and smart objects. Finally, it focuses on the design of low-cost localization systems for indoor environment, since knowing theposition of a person provides VCS with essential information to acquire information onperformed activities and to prevent risky situations. In the end, the outcomes of theseresearch directions have been integrated into a healthcare application scenario to imple-ment a wearable system that prevents freezing of gait in people affected by Parkinson\u2019sDisease