MEDICAL ASSIST FOR ISOLATED WARD PATIENTS IN HOSPITALS

Abstract

Monitoring daily activities is essential for home service robots to take care of the older adults who live alone in their homes. In this article, we proposed a Medical Assist for isolated ward pateints in hospital framework by recognizing sound events in a home environment. First, the method of context-aware sound event recognition (CoSER) is developed, which uses contextual information to disambiguate sound events. The locational context of sound events is estimated by fusing the data from the distributed passive infrared (PIR) sensors deployed in the home. A two-level dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) is used to model the intratemporal and intertemporal constraints between the context and the sound events. Second, dynamic sliding time window-based human action recognition (DTW-HaR) is developed to estimate active sound event segments with their labels and durations, then infer actions and their durations. Finally, a conditional random field (CRF) model is proposed to predict human activities based on the recognized action, location, and time. We conducted experiments in our robot-integrated smart home (RiSH) testbed to evaluate the proposed framework. The obtained results show the effectiveness and accuracy of CoSER, action recognition, and human activitymonitoring. Key Words: Activity monitoring, context-awareness, elderly care, sound event.