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Home-Based Activity Monitoring of Elderly People Through a Hierarchical Approach

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Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health (ICT4AWE 2015)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 578))

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Abstract

People that need assistance, as for instance elderly or disabled people, may be affected by a decline in daily functioning that usually involves the reduction and discontinuity in daily routines and a worsening in the overall quality of life. Thus, there is the need to intelligent systems able to monitor indoor and outdoor activities of users to detect emergencies, recognize activities, send notifications, and provide a summary of all the relevant information. To this end, several sensor-based telemonitoring and home support systems have been presented in the literature. Unfortunately, performance of those systems depends, among other characteristics, on the reliability of the adopted sensors. Although binary sensors are quite used in the literature and also in commercial solutions to identify user’s activities, they are prone to noise and errors. In this chapter, we present a hierarchical approach, based on machine learning techniques, aimed at reducing errors from the sensors. The proposed approach is aimed at improving the classification accuracy in detecting if a user is at home, away, alone or with some visits. It has been integrated in a sensor-based telemonitoring and home support system. After being evaluated with a control user, the overall system has been installed in 8 elderly people’s homes in Barcelona, results are presented in this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.moves-app.com/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.z-wave.com/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.raspberrypi.org/.

  4. 4.

    http://www.cvi-bcn.org/en/.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s, Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013, BackHome project grant agreement n. 288566.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. eHealth Department, EURECAT, Barcelona, Spain

    Xavier Rafael-Palou, Carme Zambrana, Eloisa Vargiu & Felip Miralles

Authors
  1. Xavier Rafael-Palou
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  2. Carme Zambrana
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  3. Eloisa Vargiu
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  4. Felip Miralles
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xavier Rafael-Palou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

    Markus Helfert

  2. Human-Computer Interaction, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Andreas Holzinger

  3. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Martina Ziefle

  4. Inst Sup Téc, Inst de Telecom, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    Ana Fred

  5. Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

    John O'Donoghue

  6. Sys Tech & Image Exploitation, Fraunhofer Institute of Optonics, Lemgo, Germany

    Carsten Röcker

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Rafael-Palou, X., Zambrana, C., Vargiu, E., Miralles, F. (2015). Home-Based Activity Monitoring of Elderly People Through a Hierarchical Approach. In: Helfert, M., Holzinger, A., Ziefle, M., Fred, A., O'Donoghue, J., Röcker, C. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health. ICT4AWE 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 578. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27695-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27695-3_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27695-3

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