Distributed Smart Cameras for Aging in Place*

This paper describes the design and preliminary implementation of two distributed smart camera applications: a fall detector and an object finder. These functions are part of a novel suite of applications being developed to address “aging in place” health care technologies. Our approach to these applications is unique in that they are based heavily on video data, whereas other solutions may require devices that must be worn or attached to objects. The fall detector relies on features extracted from video by the camera nodes, which are sent to a central processing node where one of several machine learning techniques are applied to detect a fall. If a fall is detected, alerts are triggered both in the home and to a third party. The object finder similarly uses a boosted cascade of classifiers to visually recognize objects either by request of the user or automatically when an object is moved.