Hom-e-Call: reserving the independence of elderly people using intelligent systems for behavior detection

Junior research group Hom-e-Call

Project goal

Investigation of technical options for recognizing emergency situations of elderly people in their home environment or in the private environment of a senior facility with the help of various sensors

Who we are

Multidisciplinary team of engineering and sport scientists

Period

August 2012 - December 2014

What are the goals of the project?

The main functionality is the optical detection of emergencies using camera technology, which is investigated by young researchers of the Chair of Digital Signal Processing and Circuit Technology. The goal is to detect emergencies, such as falls, and then to notify relatives or nursing personnel. For privacy reasons, no raw image data is transferred, so that the privacy of the elderly persons is maintained. Instead, the image data is directly processed within the system. To ensure the functionality within the entire living environment, several sensors must be connected to a sensor network. Additionally, data from inertial and vitality sensors, which are researched by project partners, are taken into consideration. In contrast to falls, where all-optical systems already provide promising approaches, an alarm can be triggered also in emergency situations, when optical sensors do not provide reliable data. Especially in such cases, the integration of additional sensors will significantly increase the quality of the results.

All sensor data must be fused and analyzed on a central server in order to draw conclusions about the current state of the person. This fusion unit is also developed at the Chair of Digital Signal Processing and Circuit Technology.

The scientific objective is to link the results of the individual sensors in order to make a reliable, probabilistic statement about possible emergencies.