WashSpot: Real-Time Spotting and Detection of Enacted Compulsive Hand Washing with Wearable Devices

Abstract

The automatic detection of hand washing has numerous applications in work and medical environments. Checking the compliance with hygiene standard in hospitals, or personal hygiene support are examples thereof. However, hand-washing can also become pathological and is a symptom of the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) spectrum. Individuals suffering from OCD are compelled to wash their hands often to the extent of harming themselves. Automatically spotting compulsive hand-washing throughout the day can assist therapeutic interventions by augmenting the on-going monitoring of compulsions. Based on this the therapist can gauge the efficacy of the chosen interventions. We present WashSpot, a neural-network based method to spot (compulsive) hand-washing on commercially available Smartwatches using inertial motion sensor data.