Sleeping recognition to assist elderly people at home

Abstract

In elderly care, activities of daily living are used to assess cognitive and physical capabilities of elderly people. In fact, cognitive and physical decline may start with problems in doing daily living activities. Elderly people may not be able to complete an activity by themselves or the activity takes more time than usual. Moreover, forgetting to do some daily activity may indicate diseases that affect memory. Sleep disorders represent a very common problem for elderly people and may influence the overall quality of life. In this paper, we focus on sleeping activity and propose a study aimed at recognize this kind of activities. The goal is twofold; on the one hand, elderly people are monitored at their home having assistance in case of needs; on the other hand, therapists, caregivers, and familiars become aware of the health status of the monitored elderly people and receive alarms and alerts in case anomalies are detected. Experiments, performed with volunteers at their homes, show that the proposed approach is able to recognize sleeping activities with high accuracy.