Ye Htet

The global rise in the elderly population, which presents challenges to healthcare systems owing to labor shortages in caregiving facilities, necessitates innovative solutions for elderly care services. Smart aging technologies such as robotic companions and digital home gadgets, offer a solution to these challenges by improving the elderly’s quality of life and assisting caregivers. However, limitations in data privacy, real-time processing, and reliability often hinder the effectiveness of the existing technologies. Among these, privacy concerns are a major barrier to ensuring user trust and ethical implementation. Therefore, this study proposes a more effective approach for smart aging through elderly activity monitoring that prioritizes data privacy. The proposed system utilizes stereo depth cameras to monitor the activities of the elderly. Data were collected from real-world environments with the participation of six elderly individuals from a care center and hospital. This system focuses on recognizing common daily actions of the elderly including sitting, standing, lying down, and seated in a wheelchair. Additionally, it recognizes transition states (in-between actions such as changing from sitting to standing) that are crucial for assessing balance issues. By integrating motion information with a deep-learning architecture, the system achieved a high accuracy of 99.42% in recognizing daily actions in real-time. This high accuracy was maintained even with minimal data from new environments through transfer learning, and the adaptability of this model ensured its potential for real-world applications. For intuitive interaction between the caregivers and the system, a user-friendly graphical interface (GUI) was also designed in the proposed approach.

Addressing the problems facing the elderly, whether living independently or in managed care facilities, is considered one of the most important applications for action recognition research. However, existing systems are not ready for automation, or for effective use in continuous operation. Therefore, we have developed theoretical and practical foundations for a new real-time action recognition system. This system is based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) along with colorizing depth maps. The use of depth cameras provides privacy protection. Colorizing depth images in the hue color space enables compressing and visualizing depth data, and detecting persons. The specific detector used for person detection is You Look Only Once (YOLOv5). Appearance and motion features are extracted from depth map sequences and are represented with a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). These HOG feature vectors are transformed as the observation sequences and then fed into the HMM. Finally, the Viterbi Algorithm is applied to recognize the sequential actions. This system has been tested on real-world data featuring three participants in a care center. We tried out three combinations of HMM with classification algorithms and found that a fusion with Support Vector Machine (SVM) had the best average results, achieving an accuracy rate (84.04%).

Smart technologies are necessary for ambient assisted living (AAL) to help family members, caregivers, and health-care professionals in providing care for elderly people independently. Among these technologies, the current work is proposed as a computer vision-based solution that can monitor the elderly by recognizing actions using a stereo depth camera. In this work, we introduce a system that fuses together feature extraction methods from previous works in a novel combination of action recognition. Using depth frame sequences provided by the depth camera, the system localizes people by extracting different regions of interest (ROI) from UV-disparity maps. As for feature vectors, the spatial-temporal features of two action representation maps (depth motion appearance (DMA) and depth motion history (DMH) with a histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) descriptor) are used in combination with the distance-based features, and fused together with the automatic rounding method for action recognition of continuous long frame sequences. The experimental results are tested using random frame sequences from a dataset that was collected at an elder care center, demonstrating that the proposed system can detect various actions in real-time with reasonable recognition rates, regardless of the length of the image sequences.