Non-intrusive Movement Detection in CARA Pervasive Healthcare Application

Pervasive healthcare promises to support the desire of many elderly for independent living and at-home care. This paper presents the CARA (Context Aware Real-time Assistant) system whose design goal is to provide a pervasive real-time intelligent at-home healthcare solution. While this is the goal it is recognized that current practice and current user requirements of both the subject (such as an elderly person) and caregiver (such as a medical consultant) may differ from our ultimate goal. Recognizing this, we have built a solution that supports scenarios of use of CARA other than as a fully automatic pervasive healthcare solution. In this paper we describe a scenario where the full wireless medical BAN (body area network) is used remotely under supervision, and supplementary continuous monitoring of the patient is done in a non-intrusive way via a movement sensor. This movement monitoring is integrated with the CARA system and can make use of CARA’s intelligent analysis as well as its recording and playback facilities. While this scenario does not use the full capabilities of the CARA system, it provides a less disruptive introduction to the technology for an elderly person, and leads easily to incremental incorporation of the technology. The full CARA system has sensors to continuously measure physiological signals, and it can either store the data on a server or stream the data to a remote location in real-time. Implementation as a rich internet application means that it is available to a remote caregiver just using any web browser that has the standard Adobe Flash plug-in. Thus the CARA system can be accessed on any internet-connected PC or appropriate smart device. The results of experiments are presented that illustrate the effectiveness of the system in analyzing a patient’s movement, and its performance over the internet. KeywordsPervasive Healthcare, Data Review, Remote Monitoring, Movement Monitoring, Rich Internet Application