A vision-based system for monitoring elderly people at home

Abstract

Assisted living technologies can be of great importance for taking care of elderly people and helping them to live independently. In this work, we propose a monitoring system designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, by exploiting computer vision techniques and visual sensors such as RGB cameras. We perform a thorough analysis of existing video datasets for action recognition, and show that no single dataset can be considered adequate in terms of classes or cardinality. We subsequently curate a taxonomy of human actions, derived from different sources in the literature, and provide the scientific community with considerations about the mutual exclusivity and commonalities of said actions. This leads us to collecting and publishing an aggregated dataset, called ALMOND (Assisted Living MONitoring Dataset), which we use as the training set for a vision-based monitoring approach. We rigorously evaluate our solution in terms of recognition accuracy using different state-of-the-art architectures, eventually reaching 97% on inference of basic poses, 83% on alerting situations, and 71% on daily life actions. We also provide a general methodology to estimate the maximum allowed distance between camera and monitored subject. Finally, we integrate the defined actions and the trained model into a computer-vision-based application, specifically designed for the objective of monitoring elderly people at their homes.