Healthcare environments have always been considered an important scenario in
which to apply new technologies to improve residents and employees conditions, solve
problems and facilitate the performance of tasks. In this way, the use of sensors based on user
movement interaction allows solving complicated situations that should be immediately
addressed, such as controlling falls and fainting spells in residential care homes. However,
ensuring that all the residents are always visually controlled by at least one employee is quite
complicated. In this paper, we present a ubiquitous and context-aware system focused on
geriatrics and residential care homes, but it could be applied to any other healthcare centre. This
system has been designed to automatically detect falls and fainting spells, alerting the most
appropriate employees to address the emergency. To that end, the system is based on
movement interaction through a set of Kinect devices that allows the identification of the
position of a person. These devices imply some development problems that authors have had to
deal with, including camera location, the detection of head movements and people in horizontal
position. The proposed system allows controlling each resident posture through a notification
and warning procedure. When an anomalous situation is detected, the system analyses the
resident posture and, if necessary, the most adequate employee will be warned to react urgently.
Ubiquity and context-awareness are essential features since the proposed system has to be able
to know where any employee is and what they are doing at any time. Finally, we present the
outcomes of an evaluation based on the ISO 9126-4 about the usability of the system.We would like to acknowledge the project CICYT TIN2011-27767-C02-01 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the Regional Goverment: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha PPII10-0300-4174 and PII2C09-0185-1030 projects for partially funding this work
