AtHoCare: An intelligent elder care at home system

Abstract

In recent years, the shortage of nursing home and the demand from elders have made the balance inclined. Additionally, the increased numbers of elders per year have not deemed fit to wait for growth rate of nursing home. Therefore, more and more elders have to stay at home and live alone, which easily leads them to be in danger, especially when unexpected emergency occurring like falling. To investigate this issue, we have designed AtHoCare, an intelligent elder care at home system, which employs Microsoft depth camera sensor Kinect to detect fall and an intelligent sever to send alarms to nurses’ smart phones. In this way, medical staffs could easily monitor several elders at the same time, which greatly increases work efficiency. It is worth stressing that AtHoCare also proposes an algorithm of fall detection based on skeleton data of elders only. It protects elders’ privacy much more than other vision based algorithm of fall detection. Results from our preliminary lab-environment test showed that AtHoCare has a well-done performance on detection.