A Smart and Minimum-intrusive Monitoring Framework Design for Health Assessment of the Elderly

The continuously increasing trend of world aging has spurred the development of healthcare services and facilities for the elderly population. A variety of daily activity and behavior monitoring systems are built to promote independent living wellbeing and provide tremendous cost benefits for the elderly. However, it has been observed that none of these efforts uses a well-defined behavioral model as theoretical basis for healthcare monitoring of the elderly. The existing behavioral models haven't been demonstrated to be highly related to the health status of the elderly. These problems obstructed a lot for achieving convincible results in the healthcare monitoring applications.;To deal with this issue, the proposed research designs a systematic framework of an intelligent, minimum-intrusive, and low-cost sensing system for monitoring behaviors of the elderly and measuring or assessing their health status. A multi-dimensional behavioral model is developed based on instruments used in functional healthcare of the elderly. Based on this behavioral model, a high-level conceptual schema is illustrated to show how sensors are mapped to behavioral items that can be measured using sensors. A practical data acquisition strategy is established and sensors are selected to collect data for room occupancy, appliance usage and activity tracking. The collected data are analyzed and some features have been extracted to characterize the daily behavioral patterns of the monitored subject. A preliminary work plan for behavioral deviation detection and psychometric property testing is proposed. Also, methods and tools are selected to visualize and integrate the health index of each dimension of behavioral model of the elderly.;This research provides a guideline for developing data-driven based health assessment instrumentation in healthcare monitoring applications for the elderly. Ultimately, the proposed system would be useful to improve elders' quality of life, lower their healthcare cost, and reduce the reliance on caregivers.