CARE: Context Awareness in Residences for Elderly

In this paper we present a system that is able to monitor activities of people in a domestic environment. The application area is that of ambient assisted living. Because of the increasing number of elderly living at home and the foreseen shortage in the number of caregivers, remote ICT-based applications will have to be developed. One of the tasks of such systems is to monitor elderly in their ability to perform the activities of daily living (ADL). We developed a system consisting of a low-power, low bandwidth wireless sensor network, incorporating simple switch sensors. As a pilot the system was installed in the apartment of an elderly lady. The data were partly annotated by the woman self. We developed a pattern recognition method based on probabilistic models. The detected clusters compare well with the labels of the annotation.