Symbolic localization of institutionalized patients for detection of daily living activities

It is essential for elder people to maintain their independence, and for that it is necessary to prevent them from reaching states of frailty. As one of the fundamental parameters in the evaluation and detection of frailty is the walking speed, monitoring this parameter in institutionalized patients would be of great help to the health staff. The goal of this work is to track physical parameters of older adults and to perform a symbolic location that allows to follow up behavioural routines as complementary information for their diagnosis. For this purpose, it is proposed that the patient carries a light multi-sensory system on his/her ankle that integrates an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a barometer and a WiFi receiver. Short range WiFi transmitters should be deployed in the rooms where monitoring is desired. Different algorithms have been developed to daily identify the number of steps and floor changes. This information and the detection of the WiFi signal strength, provide a very precise symbolic location at room level, as the preliminary results with real patients show. This is the first step to generate algorithms for automatically detecting daily living activities (ADL).