In-Bed Person Monitoring Using Thermal Infrared Sensors
Elias Josse, Amanda Nerborg, Kevin Hernandez‐Diaz, Fernando Alonso‐Fernandez · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2021
The world is expecting an aging population and shortage of healthcare professionals.This poses the problem of providing a safe and dignified life for the elderly.Technological solutions involving cameras can contribute to safety, comfort and efficient emergency responses, but they are invasive of privacy.We use 'Griddy', a prototype with a Panasonic Grid-EYE, a lowresolution infrared thermopile array sensor, which offers more privacy.Mounted over a bed, it can determine if the user is on the bed or not without human interaction.For this purpose, two datasets were captured, one (480 images) under constant conditions, and a second one (200 images) under different variations such as use of a duvet, sleeping with a pet, or increased room temperature.We test three machine learning algorithms: Support Vector Machines (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and Neural Network (NN).With 10-fold cross validation, the highest accuracy in the main dataset is for both SVM and k-NN (99%).The results with variable data show a lower reliability under certain circumstances, highlighting the need of extra work to meet the challenge of variations in the environment.