ABSTRACT
Articulated structures like the human body have many degrees of freedom. This makes an evaluation of the configuration's likelihood very challenging. In this work we propose new linked hierarchical graphical models which are able to efficiently evaluate likelihoods of articulated structures by sharing visual primitives. Instead of evaluating all configurations of the human body separately we take advantage of the fact that different configurations of the human body share body parts, and body parts, in turn, share visual primitives. A hierarchical Markov random field is used to integrate the sharing of visual primitives in a probabilistic framework. We propose a scalable hierarchical representation of the human body and show that this representation is especially well suited for human gait analysis from a frontal camera perspective. Furthermore, the results of the evaluation on a gait dataset show that sharing primitives substantially accelerates the evaluation and that our hierarchical probabilistic framework is a robust method for scalable detection of the human body.
Subject(s)
Gait , Computer Graphics , Database Management Systems , Humans , Likelihood Functions , ROC CurveABSTRACT
Worldwide, ageing societies are bringing challenges for independent living and healthcare. Health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare and sensor-enhanced health information systems offer new opportunities for care. In order to identify, implement and assess such new information and communication technologies (ICT) the 'Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing' (GAL) has been launched in 2008 as interdisciplinary research project. In this publication, we inform about the goals and structure of GAL, including first outcomes, as well as to discuss the potentials and possible barriers of such highly interdisciplinary research projects in the field of health-enabling technologies for pervasive healthcare. Although GAL's high interdisciplinarity at the beginning slowed down the speed of research progress, we can now work on problems, which can hardly be solved by one or few disciplines alone. Interdisciplinary research projects on ICT in ageing societies are needed and recommended.
Subject(s)
Aging , Environment Design , Information Systems/organization & administration , Interdisciplinary Communication , Research/organization & administration , Health Services for the Aged/organization & administration , Home Care Services/organization & administration , Humans , Independent Living , Remote Sensing Technology/methods , Social SupportABSTRACT
In this article, the design of a system for the ambient, unobtrusive and automatic monitoring of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) is described. In the context of the growing imbalance between (potentially young) caregivers and (most often older) people receiving care, technical monitoring systems may help to organise care more efficiently and to identify degrading abilities very early to trigger preventive measures. To improve the acceptance of the system described in this article, the selection process of the sensors to be integrated into the flat or to be worn by the older people has been steered by the results of focus group interviews with older people, their relatives and professional caregivers. The interviews revealed that these people would in general accept such systems, but security, mobility and communication aspects have to be clearly and appropriately addressed. In an experimental study the recognition rate of the activity 'preparation and intake of food or beverages' has been measured with two age groups (6 subjects, age between 25 and 40/mean 30 years and 5 subjects, age between 72 and 84/mean 75.3 years). The food preparation was detected with a sensitivity of 74.7% and a specificity of 84.2% using a vision sensor.
