Across the world, healthcare costs are projected to continue to increase, and the pressure on the healthcare system is only going to grow in intensity as the rate of growth of elderly population increases in the coming decades. As an example, when people age one possible condition that they may experience is sleep-disordered breathing (SDB). SDB, better known as the obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome, and associated cardiovascular complications are among the most common clinical disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
August 2016
Opportunistic ambient sensing involves placement of sensors appropriately so that intermittent contact can be made unobtrusively for gathering physiological signals for vital signs. In this paper, we discuss the results of our quality processing system used to extract heart rate from ballisto-cardiogram signals obtained from a micro-bending fiber optic sensor pressure mat. Visual inspection is used to label data into informative and non-informative classes based on their heart rate information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
June 2017
Ballistocardiogram (BCG) is a vital sign of ballistic forces generated by each heartbeat. With the advancements in related sensor and computing technologies in recent years, BCG has become far more accessible and thus regained its interest in both research and industry fields. Here we would like to promote the system modelling approach to BCG computing that allows to explore the underlying association between BCG and other physiological signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
October 2015
This paper presents a method of estimating heart rate from arrays of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors embedded in a mat. A cepstral domain signal analysis technique is proposed to characterize Ballistocardiogram (BCG) signals. With this technique, the average heart beat intervals can be estimated by detecting the dominant peaks in the cepstrum, and the signals of multiple sensors can be fused together to obtain higher signal to noise ratio than each individual sensor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE J Biomed Health Inform
January 2014
On account of chronic neurocognitive disorders, many people progressively lose their autonomy and become more dependent on others, finally reaching the stage when they need round-the-clock care from caregivers. Over time, as patients' needs increase with the evolution of their diseases, caregivers experience increasing levels of stress and burden. Therefore, an assistive solution that is able to adapt to the changing needs of the end-users is needed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
August 2015
Ballistocardiography (BCG) is a promising unobtrusive method for home e-healthcare systems, and has attracted increasing interest in recent years along with technological advances in related biomedical, electrical engineering and computer science fields. While existing systems have investigated the efficacy of BCG setups in bed, backrest, seat or scale positions, we propose to study BCG in headrest position that will allow new practical and portable applications. To this end, we designed and implemented a multi-modality sensing system including a high-sensitivity microbend fiber optic BCG sensor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: With an ever-growing ageing population, dementia is fast becoming the chronic disease of the 21st century. Elderly people affected with dementia progressively lose their autonomy as they encounter problems in their Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Hence, they need supervision and assistance from their family members or professional caregivers, which can often lead to underestimated psychological and financial stress for all parties.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
May 2012
Due to the rapidly aging population around the world, senile dementia is growing into a prominent problem in many societies. To monitor the elderly dementia patients so as to assist them in carrying out their basic Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) independently, sensors are deployed in their homes. The sensors generate a stream of context information, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs part of a sleep monitoring project, we used actigraphy based on body-worn accelerometer sensors to remotely monitor and study the sleep-wake cycle of elderly staying at nursing homes. We have conducted a fifteen patient trial of a sleep activity pattern monitoring (SAPM) system at a local nursing home. The data was collected and stored in our server and the processing of the data was done offline after sleep diaries used for validation and ground truth were updated into the system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
March 2011
Due to the decline in physical and cognitive abilities, many frail elderly may have to lie in the bed most of their time. It is not feasible to monitor them continuously through manual observations alone. This issue can be resolved by embedding a set of multimodal sensors into the bed and providing automated activity recognition intelligence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
April 2010
Disabled or cognition impaired elderly may lie in the bed most of their time. It is important to monitor their health conditions and look out for life threatening events in and around the bed continuously. Abrupt unassisted movements may lead to falls whereas the lack of desirable movements may cause bedsores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
March 2010
In systems and trials concerning wearable sensors and devices used for medical data collection, the validation of sensor data with respect to manual observations is very important. However, this is often problematic because of feigned behavior, errors in manual recording (misclassification), gaps in recording (missing readings), missed observations and timing mismatch between manual observations and sensor data due to a difference in time granularity. Using sleep activity pattern monitoring as an example we present a fast algorithm for matching sensor data with manual observations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTechnol Health Care
October 2009
This paper outlines an approach that we are taking for elder-care applications in the smart home, involving cognitive errors and their compensation. Our approach involves high level modeling of daily activities of the elderly by breaking down these activities into smaller units, which can then be automatically recognized at a low level by collections of sensors placed in the homes of the elderly. This separation allows us to employ plan recognition algorithms and systems at a high level, while developing stand-alone activity recognition algorithms and systems at a low level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIncontinence is highly prevalent in the elderly population, especially in nursing home residents with dementia. It is a distressing and costly health problem that affects not only the patients but also the caregivers. Effective continence management is required to provide quality care, and to eliminate high labor costs and annoyances to the caregivers resulting from episodes of incontinence.
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