Human detection and tracking in healthcare applications through the use of a network of sensors

Abstract

One of the most appealing applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is in human detection and tracking. The aim of these applications is to detect if a person is in an area of interest, and to keep track of his location at every instant of time. In recent years, we have seen a growing interest in the development of proposals for the use of WSNs in detection and tracking applications for healthcare. In the particular case of a patient suffering from dementia, it is very important to detect him and keep track of his location at every time, to avoid that the patient may enter to a zone of risk without supervision. When an event of interest is detected, such as wandering, an action may be taken by sending out a notification to the caregiver personnel. In this chapter, we review the most important proposals regarding the use of WSNs for human detection and tracking in healthcare applications.Moreover, we introduce amodel for detection of patients suffering from dementia, based on aWSN that uses binary sensors. The proposed model is able to detect if a patient leaves a secure zone without supervision, and to emit alerts directed to caregivers.