Actions in Context: System for People with Dementia

• Published in: Citizen in Sensor Networks pp. 3 - 14
• Main Authors: Pardo, Àlex, Clapés, Albert, Escalera, Sergio, Pujol, Oriol
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2014
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Computer vision; Dementia; Gesture recognition; Multi-modal data Fusion; Wearable sensors
• ISBN: 9783319041773; 3319041770
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-04178-0_1

In the next forty years, the number of people living with dementia is expected to triple. In the last stages, people affected by this disease become dependent. This hinders the autonomy of the patient and has a huge social impact in time, money and effort. Given this scenario, we propose an ubiquitous system capable of recognizing daily specific actions. The system fuses and synchronizes data obtained from two complementary modalities - ambient and egocentric. The ambient approach consists in a fixed RGB-Depth camera for user and object recognition and user-object interaction, whereas the egocentric point of view is given by a personal area network (PAN) formed by a few wearable sensors and a smartphone, used for gesture recognition. The system processes multi-modal data in real-time, performing paralleled task recognition and modality synchronization, showing high performance recognizing subjects, objects, and interactions, showing its reliability to be applied in real case scenarios.