[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Population aging is a common phenomenon in a society. The developed country like the United States, eldercare is becoming an important issue nowadays. There are many aspects we need to address for eldercare, including - circulatory system, alimentary system, nervous system and so on. In this research study, we focus on the heart rate monitoring and estimation using a hydraulic bed sensor. In addition, we also develop the fall detection technique using a Doppler radar. The hydraulic bed sensor for heart rate monitoring is placed under the mattress. The sensor system contains four tubes filled with water and uses the pressure sensor to obtain the Ballistocardiogram (BCG) signal. The BCG signal contains the information of heart beat, respiratory rate and body motion. Two algorithms are developed to process the bed sensor data. One uses the Hilbert transform and the other is based on the energy. By using the algorithms we developed, we can extract the heart beat information to estimate the heart rate. The system has been validated in a well controlled lab environment and a nursing house. In addition to the heart rate, the relative blood pressure measurement by using two features extracted from the bed sensor signal has also been developed and validated with 48 people data. The results show high correlation coefficient with the groundtruth. The Doppler radar for human fall detection is mounted in the ceiling. The radar senses the motion of an object and produces outputs based on the Doppler shift effect. We propose an effective method based on Wavelet Transform (WT) for fall vs. nonfall classification. The proposed fall detection classi er can distinguish between the fall and daily activities. The good performance of the proposed detection method has been validated through the data from the lab and in-home environments, with the falls from stunt actors and senior residents. To further improve the performance, we introduce an additional radar mounted on the wall. Based on the same detection method as when using one radar, we extract and concatenate the features from two radars for classification. The result shows outstanding improvement.
Intelligent fall detection system for eldercare
