Abstract
Older people are increasingly dependent on others to support their daily activities due to geriatric symptoms such as dementia. Some of them stay in long-term care facilities. Elderly people with night wandering behaviour may lose their way, leading to a significant risk of injuries. The eNightLog system was developed to monitor the night-time bedside activities of older people in order to help them cope with this issue. It comprises a 3D time-of-flight near-infrared sensor and an ultra-wideband sensor for detecting human presence and to determine postures without a video camera. A threshold-based algorithm was developed to classify different activities, such as leaving the bed. The system is able to send alarm messages to caregivers if an elderly user performs undesirable activities. In this study, 17 sets of eNightLog systems were installed in an elderly hostel with 17 beds in 9 bedrooms. During the three-month field test, 26 older people with different periods of stay were included in the study. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of detecting non-assisted bed-leaving events was 99.8%, 100%, and 99.6%, respectively. There were only three false alarms out of 2762 bed-exiting events. Our results demonstrated that the eNightLog system is sufficiently accurate to be applied in the hostel environment. Machine learning with instance segmentation and online learning will enable the system to be used for widely different environments and people, with improvements to be made in future studies.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that the global population over 60 years old will continuously grow from 900 million in 2015 to 2 billion by 2050 [1].Various health issues are emerging with the ageing population
Dementia, delirium, pressure ulcers, incontinence and frailty are commonly found in elderly people
More than 60% of people with different levels of dementia will develop wandering behaviour [27]
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that the global population over 60 years old will continuously grow from 900 million in 2015 to 2 billion by 2050 [1]. Various health issues are emerging with the ageing population. Dementia, delirium, pressure ulcers, incontinence and frailty are commonly found in elderly people. These issues are collectively known as geriatric syndromes, which are highly prevalent. Dementia is one of the most concerning issues among the geriatric syndromes. With over 46 million people living with dementia worldwide today, it is recognized as the world’s epidemic. The population with dementia is increasing sharply with the rapidly ageing global population. The number of people with dementia will reach 131.5 million by 2050
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