Human-Centric Situational Awareness in the Bedroom.

Bed-related situation monitoring is a crucial task in geriatric healthcare. Due to shortage of qualified caregivers, automatic detection of the situation in a bedroom is desirable since risks may arise when an elder gets up from the bed alone. In addition, analyzing the total amount of care time of an elder is helpful when the social effect on the improvement of the elder's health needs to be evaluated. This paper presents a context-aware healthcare system which makes use of multi-modal and un-obtrusive sensing technology meanwhile taking human feeling into account. Specifically, we choose ambient sensors such as pressure straps and a laser scanner to monitor both the activity of the elder and his/her surroundings. Moreover, a context fusion is further proposed to infer the situation of the elder. Experimental results demonstrate the high promise of our proposed methods for bed-related situation awareness. ? 2011 Springer-Verlag.