A Multi-Sensor Approach for Activity Recognition in Older Patients

Abstract — Existing surveillance systems for older people activity analysis are focused on video and sensors analysis (e.g., accelerometers, pressure, infrared) applied for frailty assessment, fall detection, and the automatic identification of self-maintenance activities (e.g., dressing, self-feeding) at home. This paper proposes a multi-sensor surveillance system (accelerometers and video-camera) for the automatic detection of instrumental activities of daily living (IADL, e.g., preparing coffee, making a phone call) in a lab-based clinical protocol. IADLs refer to more complex activities than self-maintenance which decline in performance has been highlighted as an indicator of early symptoms of dementia. Ambient video analysis is used to describe older people activity in the scene, and an accelerometer wearable device is used to complement visual information in body posture identification (e.g., standing, sitting). A generic constraint-base