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FRINATEK-Fri prosj.st. mat.,naturv.,tek

A Wireless In-Home Healthcare Monitoring System for Supporting Independent Living of Elderlies

Alternative title: Trådløst hjemmebasert helsemonitoreringssystem som støtter eldre personer til å leve et uavhengig liv

Awarded: NOK 9.7 mill.

Aging and its resultant physical and mental disorders are very serious concerns around the world. In recent years, various in-home healthcare monitoring systems have been proposed for obviating dangerous consequences of incidents threatening elderlies living at home. The drawback of existing solutions is that they are generally based on wearable monitoring devices, which may easily be forgotten to wear or ignored by the user for privacy and comfort reasons. The WiCare project developed a ground-breaking in-home healthcare monitoring solution that does not require the involvement of the home occupants, which can live their daily life without the need to wear any kind of sensors. Another advantage of the developed WiCare system is that it allows for user monitoring without using video capturing devices. This means that WiCare respects the user's privacy and it will be much less intrusive compared to video surveillance techniques. Within this research project, we have designed, prototyped, and tested an in-home healthcare monitoring system that transmits and receives radio waves from which information about the user activities can be extracted. By real-time processing of the received signals the WiCare system allows to detect predefined threats, such as falls, irregular home-side activities, and home-leaving preparations, which is of special importance for people suffering from dementia. The project has utilized the Agder Living Lab concept to assure a seamless transition from a novel research-level idea to a testable system prototype, in which end-user requirements are integrated. The project consortium has involved a panel of mobile radio communications experts and e-health specialists at the University of Agder (UiA), national end-users, world-class academic and industry partners across the world, 3 postdocs and 1 PhD fellow. The project management team has taken the opportunity to expand their knowledge of cutting-edge mobile health technologies in Norway and to develop an elegant technological health solution that improves the quality of life at home. The WiCare project has been a fundamental research project with the aim to develop a prototype of a wireless in-home healthcare monitoring system. This aim has been reached. The prototype that has been developed within WiCare is a human activity recognition (HAR) system which is able to recognizes basic human activities by using radio-frequency sensing techniques combined with machine learning. The prototype has successfully been trained with emphasis to recognize the following human activities: falling, walking, sitting down, standing up, and bending down/up. These activities can be recognized in in-home environments without using any kind of wearable sensors and by keeping the privacy of the user. A video has been produced that demonstrates the functionality of the developed WiCare prototype. The video can be seen on the homepage of the website of our research group (see https://mcg.uia.no). The developed prototype has been demonstrate in life-demonstrations to employees of Grimstad municipality, eHealth, WISENET, CAIR, and others. All invited persons were encouraged to test the WiCare system under realistic conditions in real time. Based on a large number of experiments, the overall accuracy of the system has been determined, which is in the order of 95%. In a follow-up project, called CareWell, our aim is to extend the functionality of the prototype from the recognition of basic activities to complex activities by reaching an accuracy of nearly 100%. Supposed that we are successful, then we have completed the fundamental research level and can move forward towards the technical realization level and making the solution available to the health service.

Within the WiCare project, we developed a prototype demonstrating the proof-of-concept, which has been the main objective of the project. The prototype is a fully functional radio-frequency (RF) sensing system that recognizes human activities in real time. The life-demonstrator uses a radar system, advanced time-frequency signal processing algorithms, and machine learning techniques. The system can be trained to detect practically all kinds of human activities in indoor environments, in which the user can keep his privacy and is not restricted in his comfort by wearable sensors. To exemplify the proof-of-concept, the demonstrator has been trained to detect typical daily living activities, such as walking, sitting, standing-up, sitting-down, and falling. The system can support elderly people, enabling them to live independently in their own homes for longer. The research results have been published in 36 international journal articles and in 31 international conference papers.

While aging and its resultant physical and mental disorders are very serious national concerns, the number of in-home healthcare monitoring solutions for obviating dangerous consequences of incidents threatening elderlies living at home is very limited. The offered solutions are often based on wearable monitoring devices, which may easily be forgotten to wear and/or be ignored by the user for privacy and comfort reasons. Direct video capturing techniques threaten severely the user privacy. This project proposes a groundbreaking in-home healthcare monitoring solution that not only requires no user involvement, but also fully respect the user privacy. We design, prototype, and test a so-called WiCare system, which transmits radio waves to collect fingerprint information of the user activities. The received signals will be processed to detect predefined threats, such as falls, irregular home-side activities, and home-leaving preparations (for people suffering dementia). According to the reference information architecture, defined by Norwegian Directorate of Health (DoH), the detected incident will be reported to a caregiving centre (end-user), where emergency reactions are taken. The end-to-end solution does not require the involvement of the home occupant, as she lives her private daily life without any need to wear any sensor. The project consortium involves a panel of mobile radio communications experts and e-health specialists at UiA, national end-users, world-class academic and industry partners across the world, 2 postdocs and 2 PhD fellows. The project utilizes the Agder Living Lab (funded by DoH) concept to assure a seamless transition from a novel research-level idea to a testable system prototype, in which end-user requirements are integrated. The project management team takes the opportunity to develop knowledge in cutting-edge mobile-health technologies in Norway and to coin an elegant technological healthcare solution that increases the quality of life.

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FRINATEK-Fri prosj.st. mat.,naturv.,tek