EPARS: Elderly physical activity reminder system using smartphone and wearable sensors

Abstract

The sedentary lifestyle of elderly people may cause chronic diseases, reduce muscle mass and mobility. Moreover, elderly physical inactivity increases the susceptibility to mood disorders, such as anxiety and depression, and can permanently lead to disability. Physical activity reminders might be a useful tool to motivate the elderly to do exercises. Even though the importance of them, the related works only use interactive calendars to set up activity reminders to the user, without personal and autonomous feedback about the user’s activities. Some studies have also established physical activities recognition in a smart-home context associated with interactive calendars, it’s a personalized approach, but the activity recognition is limited to a small environment, excluding the possibility of the elderly exercising outdoors. Therefore, in this work, we presented the Elderly Physical Activity Reminder System (EPARS), which is a digital assistant to reminder elderly people to practice physical exercises in an unobtrusive way. EPARS addresses the activity recognition system using wearable and mobile devices with 98.63% accuracy and the context-appropriate activity reminder module, providing a barrier-free and non-intrusive approach to guide elderly people to a healthier lifestyle. The EPARS also includes a database consisting of data collected from 32 elderly volunteers, that helped us feed the activities recognition system.