Gait and balance analysis for patients with Alzheimer's disease using an inertial-sensor-based wearable instrument.

Despite patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were reported of revealing gait disorders and balance problems, there is still lack of objective quantitative measurement of gait patterns and balance capability of AD patients. Based on an inertial-sensor-based wearable device, this paper develops gait and balance analyzing algorithms to obtain quantitative measurements and explores the essential indicators from the measurements for AD diagnosis. The gait analyzing algorithm is composed of stride detection followed by gait cycle decomposition so that gait parameters are developed from the decomposed gait details.

An interaction-embedded HMM framework for human behavior understanding: with nursing environments as examples.

This paper presents an interaction-embedded hidden Markov model (IE-HMM) framework for automatically detecting and classifying individual human behaviors and group interactions. The proposed framework comprises a switch control (SC) module, an individual duration HMM (IDHMM) module, and an interaction-coupled duration HMM (ICDHMM) module. By analyzing the relative distances between the various participants in each scene, and monitoring the duration for which these distances are maintained, the SC module assigns each participant to an individual behavior unit (comprising a single participant) or an interaction behavior unit (comprising two or more participants).

Wheelchair detection using cascaded decision tree.

One of the major goals of healthcare systems is to automatically monitor patients of special needs and alarm the caregivers for providing assistant. In this paper, an efficient single-camera multidirectional wheelchair detector based on a cascaded decision tree (CDT) is proposed to detect a wheelchair and its moving direction simultaneously from video frames for a healthcare system. Our approach combines a decision tree structure and boosted-cascade classifiers to construct a new CDT that can perform early confidence decisions in a hierarchical manner to rapidly reject nonwheelchairs and decide the moving directions.

A visual context-awareness-based sleeping-respiration measurement system.

Due to the rapid growth of the elderly population, improving specific aspects of elderly healthcare has become more important. Sleeping care systems for the elderly are rare. In this paper, we propose a visual context-aware-based sleeping-respiration measurement system that measures the respiration information of elderly sleepers.