Exploring Patterns of Activities of Daily Living in the Home Environment

Background Senior citizens tend to live longer and longer independently. Judging whether a senior person is still capable of living on his own is often based on the occurrence of incidents, with all consequences thereof. In the specific case of early dementia, the symptoms are not immediately apparent and the occurrence and severity of incidents progress gradually over time. In this case, the children or grandchildren are burdened by the question whether or not the elderly adult can still live safely and independently in his or her own home. This decision is only based on input obtained through incidental visits. We believe that the capability of independent living can only be objectively judged, by a health professional, if long term objective information on the elderly person's daily activities of living (ADL) is available. The progress in the field of miniaturised wireless sensors makes it possible to obtain real-time, objective information on a user's activities in his home environment in a way that is unobtrusive and respects the user's privacy, to ultimately be able to automatically, and unobtrusively detect slow changes in the behaviour of elderly people living in their own homes. A system, comparable to [1] is needed, one that is able to recognize a broad spectrum of ADL (e.g. cooking, eating, and sleeping) from the output of various types of miniaturised wireless sensors.