Safety Surveillance At Senior Home
A senior who lives alone may fall or faint at some location, such as a bath room, a bed room, a stairway, the kitchen, the living room, the front door, in his/her home. Up to date, there are two primary ways to detect a fall or being sedentary on a chair longer than usual (e.g., fainting due to low blood pressure while watching TV): wearable device or fixed camera.
A wearable device can be a wristband, pendant, or smart watch. Some such wearable devices have the capabilities to detect a fall and/or long-time no-activity. However, seniors tend to forget or avoid to wear such devices because of memory issues, reluctance to be identified as being old, and inconvenience.
Installing fixed cameras in all these locations are expensive. Then the captured videos need to be monitored by human and/or AI-based analysis and alert system in real-time. More importantly, for privacy seniors do not want to be monitored by cameras constantly all day and night long.
To overcome the above challenges, we develop an innovative method that utilizes Internet of Things (IOT) sensors (e.g., motion sensors, pressure sensors) installed at home to detect a possible fall or an inactivity (allowing unavoidable false positive and negative detection), and then sends an alert to a on-line care taker to direct remotely a low-profile robot with WiFi-enabled camera and speaker in the senior home to move to the location where the senior may suffer from a fall or a faint and see/talk with the senior.