ORIGINAL ARTICLE Monitoring activity of taking medicine by incorporating RFID and video analysis

Abstract In this paper, we present a new framework to monitor medication intake for elderly individuals by incorporating a video camera and radio frequency identi-fication (RFID) sensors. The proposed framework can provide a key function for monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) of elderly people at their own home. In an assistive environment, RFID tags are applied on medicine bottles located in a medicine cabinet so that each medicine bottle will have a unique ID. The description of the med-icine data for each tag is manually input to a database. RFID readers will detect if any of these bottles are taken away from the medicine cabinet and identify the tag attached on the medicine bottle. A video camera is installed to continue monitoring the activity of taking medicine by integrating face detection and tracking, mouth detection, background subtraction, and activity detection. The pre-liminary results demonstrate that 100 % detection accuracy for identifying medicine bottles and promising results for monitoring activity of taking medicine